🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <GILHAM.90Jan6103615@cassius.csl.sri.com> gilham@csl.sri.com (Fred Gilham) writes:
>What is the difference between a ``pattern'' produced by physical
>entities that is not the entities themselves, and a non-physical
>mind-stuff?  Certainly a pattern of organization does not produce new
>physical entities that did not previously exist, so the pattern must
>be non-physical.  So ``pattern'' (in the sense you are using it) and
>``mind-stuff'' in Penrose's sense seem to me to be two names for the
>same thing.
	This, of course, gets into a very old philosophical argument
about the nature of universals.  When Aristotle s id form is embedded
in matter, did he become a dualist?  In many people's view, he refuted
the dualism of Plato by this concept.  One can assert that pattern
is either:
1) a tool used to simplify the immense complexity of the universe
(e.g. it is really incorrect to say a car stopped when you pushed the
break, the thing which made the car stop was no more and no less than
the quantum (and sub-quantum) level interactions of everything in the
universe within the distance of the speed of light over the given
period of the event, and the initial probability distributions
in the universe, but this needs simplification).
2) somehow more real yet not a stuff
	As best I recall, the most extreme view (there isn't pattern
at all, and when you say the word the meaning ends at "pattern") is
called nominalism, while there are a number of intermediate views
before postulating an ontological status for pattern (as mind-stuff).
I would say that pattern has an epistemological status, in that it
is perceived by minds, and if there is a potential for any mind
or anything which can "think" to discover it, it exists, but that
pattern is not ontological (i.e. essentially part of the nature of
being) -- so that in the universe after energy death there is no
pattern.  So this is why one can speak of pattern and yet not be
peaking of a mind-stuff, since that DOES postulate a somewhat more
"concrete" reality for that stuff.
		Ron