The Journal for Patterns Recognised

The Journal for Patterns Recognised

http://socialfiction.org/jpr

Put your fingers on your closed eyelids and press gently: you can 'see' in the dark.

We can look at a stone or a wall and observe what Leonardo da Vinci described as: "several things like landscapes, battles, clouds, uncommon attitudes, humorous faces, draperies, &c. Out of this confused mass of objects, the mind will be furnished with abundance of designs and subjects perfectly new".

Pattern recognition is a subject of huge importance. Nobody is sure how big exactly.

Our minds are constantly involved in the unintentional bringing forth of patterns, even, as the sensory deprivation tank shows, without stimulus. It was Samuel Taylor Coleridge who famously identified this ability to make something out of nothing as the source behind 'imagination' as opposed to mere 'fancy'; a distinction between copying existing patterns a little different and recognising entirely new ones.

A new pattern recognised is a little revolution of everyday life: it enriches your bag of tricks to make sense of it all. Studies like those by Patrick Trevor-Roper ("The World Through Blunted Vision") attempt to show through case studies how malfunctioning vision (short-sightedness, medical conditions, etc), and by implication the entire body, alter how we experience and consequently position ourselves in the world. Trevor-Roper warns that the advancement of medical sciences have caused an increase in the uniformity of vision, and the world is the poorer for it.

By repairing and augmenting the senses, man has always sought to create new tools to improve the ability to recognise patterns. Science introduced spectacles, telescopes, microscopes, x-rays. and statistics are scientific examples of such tools; altered states, dream interpretation, automatism, the cut-up and the dream machine are just a small collection of fringe methods to recognise patterns different.

A small change in perceiving the world can cascade into large differences when acting upon it. The ability to recognise patterns that others miss will influence your decisions for the future. When your predictions turn out to be accurate it is called intelligence in yourself and luck in others. The paranoid is on the pathological side of this continuum.

The Journal for Patterns Recognised is a platform for partisan knowledge production that gathers ideas, philosophies, histories, patterns and laboratory findings from all fields of research. Our aim is to advance our understanding of pattern recognition as a first cause, as well as allow others to share in the excitement of others exploring it.

The Journal for Patterns Recognised is continuously updated and the editors are always looking for new material.

The Journal for Patterns Recognised can be contacted via: jpr [at] socialfiction [dot] org

http://socialfiction.org/jpr