October 04, 2006: The Dangerous Concept of "Pattern"

It may be the many of the exaggerated claims recently being promoted, whether about digital libraries or sharing poetry, all fall back on the assumption that "pattern" is a mathematical concept that can be readily manipulated by powerful software. The fact is that this is a dangerous misconstrual of the concept of "pattern," which can only impede efforts to engage software to facilitate the management of documents, whether those documents are the contents of a digital library or someone's favorite collection of poems. When a word is capable of causing that much trouble, my general inclination to be rid of it, and that is what I propose to do.

Rather than simply expunge the use of the word "pattern" from our current discourse, I would like to modestly propose that we consider, as an alternative, Gerald Edelman's concept of "perceptual categorization." This concept was first discussed at length in Edelman's Neural Darwinism and progressed to the primary leitmoitv in his study of consciousness, The Remembered Present. While this may strike some as little more than a word-game move, I believe there are significant ways in which Edelman's model of how the brain forms perceptual categories constitutes a departure from mathematical models of patterns.

Most important is that, while there are a variety of objective criteria that can be used to identify and define patterns, perceptual categorization puts the human subject (the perceiver) squarely in the middle of the loop. If document management is ultimately about supporting sharing and if sharing is to be an intersubjective activity (and what else could it be in any practical setting?), then we cannot abstract the subject out of the picture (at least, with my own personal convictions, I cannot). If we further follow Edelman’s lead, we also encounter some interesting properties of perceptual categories and how “wet brains” deal with them.

First of all, perceptual categories are fluid. Edelman firmly rejects the idea that any part of the brain is implementing anything like a store-and-retrieve memory system. Rather, categorizing is something the brain is always doing (probably even when we are dreaming); and a lot of that categorizing is recategorizing.

Equally important is the brain evidence Edelman has mustered that demonstrates that different parts of the brain deal with categories in space and time, respectively. Most pattern theories tend to assume that patterns in time are the same as patterns in space, because you can just include a time dimension as one of your “spatial” axes. However, when you bring human subjects into the picture, time is not just “another dimension.” We have known this since Aristotle (read his separate treatises on physics and memory to give your own gray cells a real jolt); and we are just beginning to discover how this plays out in our brains.

This then takes me to my third point: As I previously asserted, the discursive dimension is a dimension of performance. Because it is a dimension of performance, it is a temporal dimension and therefore firmly requires temporal perceptual categorization. (At this point you need to shift from Aristotle on physics and memory over to his “Poetics!”)