Eliciting a Pattern that Connects with AI?

TRANSCEND MEMBERS, 4 Mar 2024

Anthony Judge | Laetus in Praesens - TRANSCEND Media Service

Experimental Exchange with ChatGPT in Quest of Memorable Integrative Configuration

Introduction

4 Mar 2024 – This is written following the conclusion of the annual Munich Security Conference and the publication of its introductory report Munich Security Report 2024. This recognized that: At the moment, there is a real risk that more and more countries end up in a lose-lose situation, which is no longer about who gains more, but only about who loses less (Lyse Doucet, Munich security talks marked by global ‘lose-lose’ anxiety, The Guardian, 19 February 2024).

It is far from clear in what manner the prestigious event was indicative of deep strategic thinking. With respect to new ideas, the focus would appear to have been on: Stop Putin! Support Netanyahu! Arm Ukraine! Arm Israel! Protect Taiwan! Bomb Houthis! Constrain AI!

The tragedy of Gaza has seemingly been accompanied by authoritative cease fire appeals — knowing they will be ignored. This echoes the pattern caricatured by Greta Thunberg with respect to recent climate change summits: ‘Blah, blah, blah’: Greta Thunberg lambasts leaders over climate crisis (The Guardian, 28 September 2021; Greta was right about COP blah blah blah, The Malaysian Reserve, 7 December 2023).

From a historical perspective, the “lose-lose” conclusion of Munich 2024 is reminiscent of the poetic assessment of W. B. Yeats a century ago (Dorian Lynskey, ‘Things fall apart’: the apocalyptic appeal of WB Yeats’s The Second Coming, The Guardian, 30 May 2020):

Who would now be characterized as “the best”, and who “the worst” — and by whom?

It is in this context that the question of how unity, integration and coherence are to be understood merits ever increasing consideration, as with the assumptions by which they are conventionally framed. Achieving unanimity is recognized as a major challenge for the EU, for example. A contrast can be usefully made with the popular movie theme of The Highlander (1986), as exemplified by the curious inability of the USA and Israel to count beyond one in their aspirations for hegemony (There Can be Only One, Highlander.fandom.wiki).

In this period artificial intelligence, exemplified by ChatGPT, can be variously appreciated as a skilled aggregator of accessible information and its configuration into meaningful patterns — a facility that might have informed the considerations of the Munich debates. With respect to any new form of “unity”, it is therefore appropriate to explore the use of such a facility to elicit a “pattern that connects”. As a focus of continuing comment, the term famously originated from  Gregory Bateson in clarifying the nature of a meta-pattern in the following context:

The pattern which connects is a meta-pattern. It is a pattern of patterns. It is that meta-pattern which defines the vast generalization that, indeed, it is patterns which connect. (Mind and Nature: a necessary unity, 1979)

And it is from this perspective that Bateson warned: Break the pattern which connects the items of learning and you necessarily destroy all quality (1979, pp. 8-11). The meme continues to evoke commentary (Merlyn Driver, The Pattern that Connects: Gregory Bateson and the Ecology of Mind, Journal of Wild Culture, 27 October 2019; Jeffrey W. Bloom, Patterns That Connect: Rethinking Our Approach to Learning and Thinking, Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association, April 1999; Paul Andersen and David Salomon, The Pattern That Connects, Acadia 2010; Søren Brier, Bateson and Peirce on the Pattern that Connects and the Sacred, Biosemiotics, 2008; Helene Finidori, Patterns that Connect, Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the International Society for the Systems Sciences, 1, 2016, 1).

With the strategic emphasis given to the political slogan — It’s the economy stupid (and its adaptations) — does the focus on patterns invite yet another adaptation: It’s the pattern stupid ? Paradoxically any implication of “stupidity”, through failure of pattern recognition, is itself necessarily problematic in a cancel culture.

Previous reflections on its implications are presented separately: Riddle for global civilization of the pattern that connects (2021); Psychosocial “global implication” of a “pattern that connects”? (2020); Cognitive dynamics sustaining the meta-pattern that connects (2013). These variously call into question assumptions regarding the singularity of “the” pattern, the meaning to be associated with “pattern”, as with any sense of “connectivity”.

There is indeed a fundamental challenge to the connectivity of any such pattern, namely the question of its widespread memorability and comprehensibility. Bateson offers a valuable aesthetic insight in that regard in explaining why “we are our own metaphor” to a conference on the effects of conscious purpose on human adaptation:

One reason why poetry is important for finding out about the world is because in poetry a set of relationships get mapped onto a level of diversity in us that we don’t ordinarily have access to. We bring it out in poetry. We can give to each other in poetry the access to a set of relationships in the other person and in the world that we are not usually conscious of in ourselves. So we need poetry as knowledge about the world and about ourselves, because of this mapping from complexity to complexity. (Cited by Mary Catherine Bateson, 1972, pp. 288-9)

The challenge of memorability is articulated otherwise by Doris Lessing in a devastating commentary on communication of insight by a “galactic agent” with a representative of those facing planetary disaster:

• • • • To say that he understood what went on was true. To say that he did not understand — was true. I would sit and explain, over and over again. He listened, his eyes fixed on my face, his lips moving as he repeated to himself what I was saying. He would nod: yes, he had grasped it. But a few minutes later, when I might be saying something of the same kind, he was uncomfortable, threatened. Why was I saying that? and that? his troubled eyes asked of my face: What did I mean? His questions at such moments were as if I had never taught him anything at all. He was like one drugged or in shock. Yet it seemed that he did absorb information for sometimes he would talk as if from a basis of shared knowledge: it was as if a part of him knew and remembered all I told him, but other parts had not heard a word. I have never before or since had so strongly that experience of being with a person and knowing that all the time there was certainly a part of that person in contact with you, something real and alive and listening — and yet most of the time what one said did not reach that silent and invisible being, and what he said was not often said by the real part of him. It was as if someone stood there bound and gagged while an inferior impersonator spoke for him.

    (Re: Colonised Planet 5 – Shikasta, 1979, pp. 56-57).

Faced with global strategic insanity and civilizational collapse — as many now argue — it could be asked whether these trends are indicative of a form of collective dementia for which Lessing’s speculative framing is appropriate. With “everything connected to everything”, is any pattern that connects — of relevance to governance — then inherently incomprehensible in practice?

The approach here follows from previous consideration of the role of “pillars” in relationship to the patterned configuration of strategic principles — and their interconnection as “ways of looking” (Principles, pillars, projectives and metaphorical geometry, 2024). Of relevance to reference to the pillar metaphor is its use in distinguishing the 16 pillars of the Earth Charter.

The question previously addressed is the Use of AI in enabling configuration of psychosocial pillars (2024). This concluded with a focus on the possibility of comprehending unification and integration coherently by other means (Higher Dimensional Reframing of Unity and Memorable Identity, 2024). The argument offered the suggestion that any quest for “unity” is more appropriately envisaged in 4D (or more) rather than in 3D — or through conventional framing of territorial conflicts in 2D (Neglect of Higher Dimensional Solutions to Territorial Conflicts, 2024). Obvious challenges are Russia-Ukraine, the Koreas, China-Taiwan, and Israel-Palestine.

Rather than the previous focus on visual recognition of a pattern that connects, the argument here envisages how such connectivity may well be only comprehensible and credible through a combination of senses — most notably including sound. There is a delightful irony to the possibility that traditional musical insights regarding the “monochord” may be fundamental to widespread comprehension of “unity” thereby reframed in terms of the numeric “proportions” through which strategic patterns tend to be articulated. This is notably suggested by revisiting the lambda arrangement of numbers in early Greek mathematics. There is every probability that strategic articulations may then be “consonant” with tuning in some manner — inhibiting uptake if they are experienced as “out of tune”

It is from that perspective that the question is raised as to whether conventional strategic articulation is fundamentally “out of tune” through its controversial standardization of “pitch” — strangely analogous to the rapidly developing imposition of a narrative “pitch” by mainstream media.

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