Have just re-read PR for about the 20th time and came back to this board.

I've just noticed something that has tickled me - there are many threads trying to recognise patterns within Pattern Recognition!

Sorry for the new topic, but there was an older one that to which this was relevant, but it's closed.

That's it exactly !
And there a lot of patterns in Neuromancer and the whole first trilogy too... Moreover the "specialist" who is generally the main character of Gibson's novels knows how to "read" patterns (Case, Colin Laney, Cayce Pollard... also Johnny Mnemonic).
They all know how to break some kind of code, until they meet the strange artificial intelligence that is,

i think the foundation of WG's abilities is his pattern recognition.

What misty said. And: pattern recognition is what life on earth seems to do. Also: welcome to literary criticism/theory. Finding patterns in the things humans write since Aristotle.

I think it comes down to the fear that there might not actually be any patterns in life – it's all in our heads. That's why we (or at least I) love Cayce and Case, because they just "get it" and that's something I've never been able to do with my own life.

Over the history of thinking, Copernicus and Darwin took away our supposed place in the universe and our traditional identity on Earth. Maybe the next big shock will be to take away the "world" itself, because it's just been fashioned by the collective consciousness of a species that insists it is here for a reason.

Sorry - didn't mean to be flamebait-ey. I totally agree that searching for patterns is part of what makes us human.

My original post was merely a linguistic enjoyment of the circular reference!

Im so old (46) I remember this!

quote:

Originally posted by misty:
i think the foundation of WG's abilities is his pattern recognition.

I agree with this!

quote:

Originally posted by Justy:
What misty said. And: pattern recognition is what life on earth seems to do. Also: welcome to literary criticism/theory. Finding patterns in the things humans write since Aristotle.

Also, note that paranoia is a result of pattern recognition. One just sets the threshold for recognizing potentially harmrful patterns very low. Too low.