ART & ORGANISM
Patterns
Searching for patterns is searching for harmonies: the medieval ideal, according to Joseph Campbell (1972):
“accord between the structure of the universe, the canons of the social order and the good of the individual.”
William James (1902) said,
“. . . the religious life consists of the belief that there is an unseen order and that our supreme good lies in harmoniously adjusting ourselves thereto
___________________________________________________
“Nature seems to be built on patterns, and looking for these patterns is the primary preoccupation of artists and scientists alike[i] “What’s beautiful in science is the same thing that’s beautiful in Beethoven,” says [the physicist Victor] Weisskopf.
“There’s a fog of events and suddenly you see a connection. It expresses a complex of human concerns that goes deeply to you, that connects things that were always in you that were never put together before.” (K.C. Cole in Sympathetic Vibrations: Reflections on Physics as a Way of Life.
“Art is the imposing of a pattern on experience, and our aesthetic enjoyment is recognition of the pattern.” (Alfred North Whitehead, Dialogues (1954) 10 June 1943)
Is pattern separation and pattern completion at play in MEMORY
Behaviorally separable processes? (Ngo et al. 2021):
“Episodic memory capacity requires several processes, including mnemonic discrimination of similar experiences, termed pattern separation, and holistic retrieval of multidimensional experiences given a cue, termed pattern completion. Both computations seem to rely on the hippocampus proper, but they also seem to be instantiated by distinct hippocampal subfields.
“Episodic memory binds together the diverse co-occurring elements that make up the specific events of our lives, forming distinctive and complex events that can guide ongoing behavior. This capacity requires many processes.
Past experiences can share overlapping content, hampering the retrieval of a specific event against the backdrop of interfering memories. Thus, remembering a past event with high specificity is optimized by pattern separation processes, whereby similar experiences are assigned to non-overlapping neural codes in the service of preserving each event’s distinctiveness. Further, episodic memory retrieval unites various aspects of an event including where you were, specific people you met, and the objects that were encountered as an integrated unit… Pattern completion processes enables this network of relations to be retrieved holistically, such that one constituent of an event can elicit the retrieval of other elements from the same event.
Computational models posit that the hippocampus instantiates two crucial computations of pattern separation and pattern completion to support mnemonic discrimination and holistic recollection. Critically, hippocampal subfields differentially participate in these processes…”
(INTRODUCTION from Ngo et al. 2021)
_________
PATTERNS apparently exist at all levels of organization–not least (considering our interests in A&O) neuronal, behavioral, social…
- PROKARYOTIC MEMORY: READ “The cognitive cell: bacterial behavior reconsidered,”by Pamela Lyon. The mechanism used by single cells that challenge the traditional idea that memory resides in changes in multi-neuronal patterns of synaptic strength or connectivity between neurons: quick overview reported by Catherine Offord (2021)in The Scientist
[i]. Searching for patterns is searching for harmonies: the medieval ideal, according to Joseph Campbell (1972): “accord between the structure of the universe, the canons of the social order and the good of the individual.” Williams James (1902) said, “. . . the religious life consists of the belief that there is an unseen order and that our supreme good lies in harmoniously adjusting ourselves thereto.”
NEXUS