more signals

I'm reading William Gibson's Pattern Recognition. I'd sworn to read it after reading All Tommorrow's Parties, but then I'd promised that I wasn't going to read that after reading Virtual Light. This one though is well worth reading. This novels influence can be seen in my recent posts.

Signals do arise from the noise, that's the odd thing.

Signals arise in three different ways:

1. spurious signals, everything from paranoid delusions to various procedures for finding patterns that are really only reflections of the procedure (from reading tea leaves on)

2. genuine signals, appropriate inferences on available evidence leading to deeper knowledge. Looking as the movements in the sky and inferring that there are planets, that move in regular orbits and are explained a certain. Looking at the movement of a speck of pollen and inferring the molecular nature of matter. But not only scientific truths. Listening to person's speech and learning things about that aren't explicitly stated, where they're from, who they've spoken to and so on.

Whenever I get into the sorts of moods about how surprising it is that the world makes sense, someone tries to deflate my euphoria. This is not necessarily a bad thing, and if the deflators point is that I'm engaged in irresponsbile navel-gazing, well I have no defense. More frequently someone will object that order of either sort is not surprising because there are human minds around that are very well adapted for recognizing patterns. In fact, over-adapated for pattern recognition, which accounts for spurious patterns.

This strategy frustrates me. It's particularly frustrating when Peircean distinctions are used to deflate my mood. "Its simple," they explain "Every symbol means something for someone under some interpretation. There's no mystery because patterns only emerge for somebody."

Time to reread Peirce.

What is a person? "A Person is nothing but a symbol involving a general idea" (as he says in "Man's Glassy Essence" refering back to "Some Consequences"). Even more than being a natural system that can detect order, a person is a naturally ordered system. While the physical details of how the brain works still need to be worked out in their entirety, it's pretty clear that this is all something we do with our brains.

Explaining the human ability to recognize signals and patterns is equivalent to explaining the existence of signals and patterns through the existence of a special sort of signals and patterns (those that occur in brains). This come real close to circularity. Either the mind is something other than a naturally occuring patterned activity, or the mind can not be used in a non-circular way to explain why there are symbols, patterns or signals.

This dichotomy isn't really a challenge to any naturalist. Just explain the mind as a information process in turn explained physiologically. Thus, the third sort of symbol to be explained is

3. mind