ART & ORGANISM
Patterns
“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.
Recalls Whitehead’s “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)
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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.”