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Vecna's back. Regale us with your drunken political commentary.

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NO! Must... stay... away... from... politics.

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Aww. Vecna and Lithos, Angry Young Men of the WGB, back together again.

It would warm the cockles of my heart, if I had a heart.

Hey, I'm not THAT angry. I'm not that young either. I'm approaching 27 years of age like a freight train ... at least it feels that way. Stupid age. Stupid biochemistry. Stupid pituitary gland. Stupid world.

K, maybe I am a LITTLE angry.

Why pattern recognition? Isn't it obvious? A pattern in Napoleanic times was a war.

Why 27? 27 was a pretty good age, I gained the majority of my Buddha weight between 27 and 30. Now I'm walking it off again! Smiles

Here's to the pituitary!

=Christopher J. Bradley

pattern recognition - a Gestalt thing...

Just finished the book and feel a bit spooked! My name is Magda, I was born in Poland, I recently started my own software company in the Mobile Games space, and am related to the original author of Solaris (and have seen the Russian version of the movie)... Have been involved with Internet/Web/viral marketing in the past several years...
Talk about patterns!

Stanislaw Lem's "Solaris" is a very good book, though I've only read the english translation.

Hi, here's the link to the Russian version of the movie - worth seeing...
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0069293/

quote:

Originally posted by martin:
Stanislaw Lem's "Solaris" is a very good book, though I've only read the english translation.

Oh now there's a thought. Solaris (both the book and the Russian film) are very much about patterns. The space station is devoted to studying the ocean covering the planet and therefore seeking to recognise patterns in it. The ocean, meanwhile, actualises patterns in the minds of the scientists and creates real objects from the memories guilt and fantasies.

another thought about why "PR" would be that PR is the technology used in AI to create programs capable, on their own, of recognizing any type of stimulus they have previously encountered. The footage may be such a pattern and the internet, the AI neural net seeking to recognize that pattern. What the book may propose is that humans have created the internet, which is now funtioning as an AI system. This system is in turn prompting us to carry out small recognition tasks for the larger AI system, as if we were worker bees in its neural net nest. This cycle of AI interfaces in turn can be thought of as itself creating several sets of pattern recognition problems to be recognized by various AI systems or metaphors for AI systems. The question of what and who possesses AI and who doesn't is posed here. This draws forth further questions about the structure not of human subjectivity per se, but more of the structure of structure, the pattern of pattern and chaos' dependence on the backside of pattern's pattern. Perhaps it is an attempt to look beyond the notion of pattern and not-pattern. It makes me wonder what the experience of perception without pattern and/or chaos would be like.

You know, I like to think that, in reading a book, much of what I get out of it has little or nothing to do with the author's intent. I like Gibson's writing and I'm sure I'll read the next one that comes out but he's no expert on my interpretation of his work. I connected with the idea of pattern recognition because it's a recurrent theme in the question of what intelligence and communication are and mean...

A lot of the pattern recognition processing in the brain goes on at a level below conciousness...our ability to hear voices in the wind and water hangs on the audio processing that filters formants out of noise...all done in "audio processing" with no "thought" involved...but pulling data out of the noise? reading tea leaves? there's some other kind of processing going on there too.

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Originally posted by colin:
Well, if you want my take on the author's intentions regarding pattern recognition I think that he was not so much trying to make a statement as raise a question. We humans are so good at pattern recognition that we see patterns that aren't there, or might not be there. But how do we decide whether our pattern recognition is serving us, or whether it is faulty?

It's actually been a while since I wrote that and in the interval my thoughts on authors and their intents have shifted a bit. I don't think I'd use the word "intent" there anymore, but rather, "something that was probably rolling around in WG's head at the time."

The reason for this change? I've written things and given them to people to read. Sometimes they come back with the strangest ideas based on details I wasn't even really aware of. Maybe some things are in there at a subconscious level, maybe not, but from empirical evidence the intentions of the author don't necessarily have a lot to do with what a reader gets out of the story. I suspect good authors realise this, and write with themes and such in mind, but without "intent."

There's even a name for this - the Intentional Fallacy. It's the idea that a work of art consists of no more than the author's intentions, and so all criticism is a kind of crossword puzzle. In practice, authors don't necessarily fully understand what they are doing, and may well reveal things or hint at things without realising they are doing it. There is, of course, a big debate about whether all interpretations of a text are therefore equally valid.

I guess I should mention that even when I wrote the first comment I wouldn't ever have said that a work consists of no more than the author's intentions. And I still think (as I thought then) it is obviously silly to suggest that all interpretations of a text are equally valid.