- But, but, but, physical things, like blueberries. They must not be just a pattern?
- They are. The key feature that lets us perceive a lump of matter as a blueberry is how its atoms are arranged, a pattern. The arrangement makes the lump good at reflecting blue light, among other things.
- The atoms then? They are real.
- They are also just patterns of even smaller things. Or a collection of measurements made by man made apparatus.
- The light?
- No, not even the light. Everything you can identify as an isolated thing is just a pattern, specific arrangements of smaller things or measurements. Extended in time or space. To be able to recognize a blueberry, its pattern needs to be interpreted by a computing device, i.e. it becomes software for the device, which transforms it into a different pattern. It could become an idea stored in your memory or a rearrangement of your muscular pattern, i.e. movement.
Physical things are patterns. Abstract things are patterns. Everything are patterns.
The things we call physical are the patterns that exclusively occupy a part of physical reality. No other pattern that exists at the same abstraction level can claim the same space at the same time. Some of our senses like touch and vision have evolved to measure physical patterns.
All patterns are real - by that I mean that they exist somewhere in spacetime - also those that traditionally have been regarded as abstract. Thoughts are real. Numbers are real. Genes are real. They are patterns that can change other patterns, for example the patterns we categorise as physical.
Abstract patterns are substrate independent. If you try to understand them by investigating what the substrate is doing - the particles - the meaning is lost.
Abstract patterns of information are easy to create as long as we have a universal computer, e.g. our mind. When we try to create patterns in the physical world we encounter resistance. Most attempts don't work out the way we would like them to. The resistance is the laws of physics.
Evolution produces computation devices that take patterns as inputs and turn them into output patterns. Life is computation. Computations that can avoid being destroyed by reality stays around. New kinds of computation are created by mutation.
Memes are patterns that run on the reality simulator running on your neurons. They can create copies of themselves in other people's minds. To be able to do that they must survive in the simulated reality and they must create patterns in the physical reality that can be perceived by other people's senses. Memes evolve due to errors in this process. New memes can also arise from our creativity, i.e. ideas trapped in our minds that evolve into a pattern capable of escaping.
It could be that there are physical things out there in reality, but we can only ever understand and process patterns, because our mind is a computing device and patterns are the only thing it can know anything about.
P.S. In Objective Knowledge, Popper uses the concepts of first, second and third world to describe the physical, the personal and the memetic worlds. The laws of physics (first world) created the first replicators by deterministic application of forces. The replicators are then able to preserve the knowledge of replication through the feedback loop of replication. Mutations create new knowledge that hangs on to the stabilising attractor of replication. Neo-Darwinian evolution takes place in this constructed environment maintained by replicators (world 1.5?). The auxiliary knowledge gives rise to new computations that are not just replication. At first it only performs simple transformations from measurement (pattern recognition) to action (pattern creation). When these computations become more and more complex, a simulation of the first world starts to emerge in the mind of the organism (second world) - a virtualisation of physical reality. A new kind of knowledge preserved by replication across minds can arise. It takes the form of memes in the third world. This knowledge survives the death of any particular person. This is not true for knowledge instantiated in the mind of a single person that didn't become memetic. This drive we have to create memetic knowledge and our intuitive recognition of good memetic knowledge has emerged from genetic mutation. How can we recreate this complex computation and run it on a computer? Just any recreation will not do. We also want this artificial person to be part of our third world - to share our memes. D.S.
