36 3 A Patternist Philosophy of Mind

36 3 A Patternist Philosophy of Mind system for recognizing patterns in itself and the world, critically including patterns regarding which procedures are likely to lead to the achievement of which goals in which contexts. Pattern as the basis of mind is not in itself is a very novel idea; this concept is present, for instance, in the 19th-century philosophy of Charles Peirce [Pei34], in the writings of contempo- rary philosophers Daniel Dennett [Den91] and Douglas Hofstadter [Hof79, Hof96], in Benjamin Whorf’s [Who64] linguistic philosophy and Gregory Bateson’s [Bat79] systems theory of mind and nature. Bateson spoke of the Metapattern: “that it is pattern which connects.” In Goertzel’s writings on philosophy of mind, an effort has been made to pursue this theme more thoroughly than has been done before, and to articulate in detail how various aspects of human mind and mind in general can be well-understood by explicitly adopting a patternist perspective. ! In the patternist perspective, "pattern" is generally defined as "representation as something simpler." Thus, for example, if one measures simplicity in terms of bit-count, then a program compressing an image would be a pattern in that image. But if one uses a simplicity measure incorporating run-time as well as bit-count, then the compressed version may or may not be a pattern in the image, depending on how one’s simplicity measure weights the two factors. This definition encompasses simple repeated patterns, but also much more complex ones. While pattern theory has typically been elaborated in the context of computational theory, it is not intrinsically tied to computation; rather, it can be developed in any context where there is a notion of "representation" or "production" and a way of measuring simplicity. One just needs to be able to assess the extent to which f represents or produces X, and then to compare the simplicity of f and X; and then one can assess whether f is a pattern in X. A formalization of this notion of pattern is given in [Goe06a] and briefly summarized at the end of this chapter. Next, in patternism the mind of an intelligent system is conceived as the (fuzzy) set of patterns in that system, and the set of patterns emergent between that system and other systems with which it interacts. The latter clause means that the patternist perspective is inclusive of notions of distributed intelligence [[ut96]. Basically, the mind of a system is the fuzzy set of different simplifying representations of that system that may be adopted. Intelligence is conceived, similarly to in Marcus Hutter’s [ut05] recent work (and as elabo- rated informally in Chapter 2 above, and formally in Chapter 7 below), as the ability to achieve complex goals in complex environments; where complexity itself may be defined as the pos- session of a rich variety of patterns. A mind is thus a collection of patterns that is associated with a persistent dynamical process that achieves highly-patterned goals in highly-patterned environments. An additional hypothesis made within the patternist philosophy of mind is that reflection is critical to intelligence. This lets us conceive an intelligent system as a dynamical system that recognizes patterns in its environment and itself, as part of its quest to achieve complex goals. While this approach is quite general, it is not vacuous; it gives a particular structure to the tasks of analyzing and synthesizing intelligent systems. About any would-be intelligent system, we are led to ask questions such as: e How are patterns represented in the system? That is, how does the underlying infrastructure of the system give rise to the displaying of a particular pattern in the system’s behavior? e What kinds of patterns are most compactly represented within the system? e What kinds of patterns are most simply learned? 1 In some prior writings the term “psynet model of mind” has been used to refer to the application of patternist philosophy to cognitive theory, but this term has been "deprecated" in recent publications as it seemed to introduce more confusion than clarification. HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_012952