Human Essence is Pattern!

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Human Essence is Pattern!

Everything human is part emotion and part reason. Draw a line connecting emotion on one end and reason on the other end. All domains of knowledge lie somewhere between these two end points; with music being the end of the line at emotion and mathematics being at the end of the line at reason.

The characteristic that is the essence of music and math is pattern. The human essence is pattern. Beauty is pattern. Meaning is pattern. Perception is pattern. Love is pattern.

When I hike in the mountains, occasionally I am stopped dead in my tracks with my blood running cold; I have spotted a pattern in the trees that frightens me instinctively.

I hear music that drives me into melancholy or happiness or dread, or etc.

I suddenly understand something that I have pondered for months or years and I feel the ecstasy of understanding. I have created meaning. I have created a pattern that both reason and emotion call good.

The sign of correctness in physics theory is beauty of pattern. Ocam’s razor cuts loose all that is not essential to the pattern. The beauty of the pattern discovered in Quantum Electro Dynamics by Feynman as displayed in his book “QED” is astounding to me. I think that this book displays the essence of understanding and of the pattern within understanding. Kuhn’s theory about paradigms is an attempt to display the pattern in normal science.

The foundation of both music and math is pattern, one affects us primarily through emotion the other primarily through reason but both do so through some proper combination of pattern.

Nature is the Mother of all patterns. Is there any more obvious pattern than DNA? Only after Crick and Watson found the pattern did they understand DNA.

What do you think about them apples? Have I lost my pattern?

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Beautifully written! From a philosophic POV, however, some of these ideas need discussion. I cannot see music at one end of the spectrum and mathematics at the other. Music is a vocalized form of math as determining structure and structually dependent sound. Yet this situation is not deterministic. An infinite number of melodies can be played on an 11 tone piano. Pythagoras was so impressed by harmony in music and mathematics that he considered them cosmological! The music of the spheres! Emotion is the impetus behind reason. It is reason’s intermediate souce, if you buy Paul D. MacLean’s ideas. Pattern is recognition of recurrences known by all organisms, not just by humans. It provides the necessary sense of bearings that substantiates existence, promotes adaptability and utilizes potential. Everything human is drive, emotion and reason working to achieve a common goal. While each of these may entail a spectrum of intensity, none are part of any polarity.

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Check out Zhu Xi’s writings on ‘li’. He fleshes out what you said.

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Ierrellus

I put music and math at the far ends of the spectrum of domains of knowledge because I would say that music might be thought of as 90% emotional affect and 10% rational affect whereas math would be 90% rational and 10% emotional in how humans are affected by these two domains of knowledge. This being the case while both are so essentially pattern saturated domains of knowledge.

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The problem I would have with your major thesis is that very few humans act rationally. Or, at least, rationality cannot be accurately used to predict the actions of humans (suggesting, to me at least, that our rationality is flawed, but that is another story).

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Coberst,
Regardless of where you put music and math, they are constituents of the same phenomenon, not to be split on any imaginary scale. Neither emotion nor pattern totally descibes either; but experience can and does.
Any definitions of knowing that exclude motion and change, such as positions of importance of apects of knowing in scales, are arbitrary at best, irrelevant at least.

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beingandquirckiness.blogspot.com … rmony.html

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Finally, one step ahead, one realizes that truth for the modern day westerner is on the one hand what makes a consensus and on the other hand what no one can deny, this second point implying the first. There exists in effect a primacy of negation: is considered to be true what one cannot deny. Moreover, in a certain number of cases, one cannot deny an assertion or its contrary. For example one cannot deny the existence of God or Gods’ non-existence. We consequently conclude that “It is not important to know whether God exists or not, what is important is the way in which one believes or disbelieves”.

It is also for this reason that mathematics seduce so much, are omnipresent and impose themselves as wisdom, for they prop themselves up on an aspect of intelligence and on a logic with a universal countenance. Can we demonstrate that 1+1=2? I don’t think we can, but we cannot demonstrate the contrary. Therefore it is of little importance whether it is true of false, but what we can do with it, statistics, marketing etc.

I know a little chap who got an F in algebra because to the question “how much are 1 and 1”, he would obstinately answer “1”. So his mother, a bit bewildered and asking herself if he was not a bit retarded, turned to him holding a tennis ball, then a second one, and asked him: “So now, this ball plus this ball, how many balls in the hands?, and he answered : “Two, of course! But that was not in the least the question that the teacher asked! She did not say how much are 1 plus 1, she asked how much are 1 and 1! Yet 1 and 1 is 1 mom, just like you and you is you, and moreover, you and you doesn’t mean anything since it is already all of you in you!”… The little chap had already understood what One is and what a transcendental is! In fact, I have oft noticed that children are much better metaphysicians than many adults who are perverted in their intelligence. That is the spirit of youth which we hear of here and there, not infantilism. The child always seeks the “why” of things, and he is right to do so, for that’s really all that is interesting, whereas the adult does not cease to bog himself down in the “how” of things… It is the adult who is infantile!

Now then, what is worrying is that negation is at the heart of what is considered by the modern westerner as true. One must imo scratch quite a bit around that spot. :slight_smile:

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idt.mdh.se/~icc/1+1=2.htm

Actually, we can show that 1+1=2. I don’t have the proof, but I do believe that we have since proven addition.

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ok! I will elaborate on the mathematics as truth angle in due time.

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I wonder if Aristotle did not invent the term “quiddity” to distinguish between a reasoning intelligence and a contemplative intelligence. Imo reason is made for the quiddity and intelligence is made for being, which is not a quiddity… This is where one must distinguish science and wisdom. The exercice of our intelligence is not solely univocal (universal), it is also personal (and that is where analogy comes into play), for it is obvious for example that love is not univocal. #-o

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harvey,
=D> Good stuff & not nonsense. For the logical positivist 1 + 1 = 2. For the rest of us the question is 1 what? Yes one apple plus another apple equals two apples. One apple plus one orange equals two fruits. One apple plus one rock equals two objects. Notice how when the mathematical abstract identity is taken away what is seen as equal becomes more and more generic. In the first volume of Walter Kaufmann’s “Discovering the Mind” Goethe’s takes on this matter are very relevant. Logical positivists usually cannot recognize paradigm shifts or the fallibility of ultimate truths, which are indications of motion and change and of learning as a possibility of complexification. If our minds are part of the processes of becoming, they are not partakers of god-like certainties.
In another forum an LP kept insisting that knowing the capitol of Bolivia is knowing an absolute fact. He could not realize that, given sufficient time, that may no longer be fact. Facts are phase-stable parts of processes, plateaus from which we can get our bearings and move forward.

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Good point.

To elaborate on the primacy of negation… beingandquirckiness.blogspot.com … gence.html

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first, russel and whitehead has shown that all branches of mathematics can be deduced to logic, just as physics can be deduced to mathematics. so, logic is where the ‘truth’ is.

second, concerning 1+1=2. the proof for that is flawed and i do not think that bertrand and whitehead said that.

but keep posting pics from books no one understands :smiley:

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V_d,
What Russell and Whitehead did not comprehend, according to the definitions given above, is that logic can prove or disprove anything, including itself. As I stated elsewhere, logic is a tool, not an answer. There is no truth to a hammer or a saw. There is truth that certain things can be done using them. But no one would use a saw to drive a nail or a hammer to cut down a tree limb. Seeing tools as absolute certainties or as having universal applications denies their individual, practical uses; and this denial has spawned more tenuous philosophic ideas than has any other.
Essence is the potential for pattern.

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but isn’t the capitol of bolivia an absolute fact with all things measured? (time,dimensions, etc.) i mean how do we define things if theyre not necessarily true? i understand granted things change but at said time you can make statements right? we are x units from y position. we are x + y personality trait. nothing is in motion or alive if it has nothing to relate motion to. you must have 1 and 0 to have math the same way you must be able to have earth plus the capital of bolivia defined. or am i off base?

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You are right in a way, life is essentially a pattern that cannot help but try to repeat itself even when the last glimmer of the original winked out a millenia ago. And ‘as below so above’ as the occultists say.

Mind you, when you walk around with “Everything is X.” spinning around in your head - Then it will kinda only ever confirm itself to be true. I could say “Everything is a starfish” with equal certainty. It’s like buying a Ford Focus, or having a baby - Once done - Suddenly, you see them everywhere.

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Recurrence allows for some predictability; yet as Heraclitus noted, you cannot step into the same river twice. Since we exist in geological time, but with an immediate perspective of time as mood (changing), we find comfort in the fact that what happens in the larger frame of time appears unchanging. Change often causes sorrow or fear. This may be the reason for our need for static truths, for believing that the capital of Bolivia may never change.

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This is where you get two different sets of ‘facts’. There are facts that are derived from mathmatical (or other) truisms, and facts that are created through definition. Ultimately (of course) the former set becomes the latter set, but for simplicity’s sake, we’ll keep them (arbitrarily) seperate for now.

We’ve defined the capital of Bolivia (Ironic since it is actually ‘capitals’ of Bolivia, but that is neither here-nor-there), so the Capitals of Bolivia are La Paz and Sucre.
It goes back to the whole ‘is pluto a planet’ discussion. People like IMP and SIATD said that scientists were ‘lying’ to people, when the definition of planet wasn’t derived from observations but rather created to serve a purpose. As such, it can change quite readily.

V_D,
The proof comes from a respected book on mathmatics – would you care to demonstrate where the proof is flawed with a source?

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Human’s require pattern because this is how our brains translate sensory imput. That doesn’t make pattern a universal reality. It makes it a human reality in the sense that customized reality is essential for the existence of different members of different species. Only a god could postulate universal reality.