Pattern, Thought, Pattern

A mathematician, like a painter or a poet, is a maker of patterns. […] The mathematician’s patterns, like the painter’s or the poet’s must be beautiful; the ideas like the colours or the words, must fit together in a harmonious way. (G.H. Hardy, A mathematician’s apology[1])

An array of illusionary techniques enables an artist to create working models, which, by implication, reveal something of our understanding of the world about us. This understanding is of a qualitative character. An involvement beyond mere passive experience is required if art is to be significant communication. The artist requires as incisive and tough an approach as the mathematician who, through examining his experience of mathematics, being aware of pattern and structure, and with an exploratory motivation similar to that of the artist, makes the extension of that process comprehensible.

Fine art and mathematics apply themselves to extending their language to order and relate, and hence extend, the shifting visual and intellectual intuitive concepts of our time (mathematics by quantifying, art by ‘qualifying’). Yet to link the two disciplines is misleading, since the contemporary artist has made his research, not a means to an end, but an end in itself. The fine arts are rarely seen as being as necessary as mathematics, and at best the artist receives premature enshrinement when his works (all-in-all just by-products of processes) are separated from life when becoming collected items.

It is therefore hardly surprising that art finds itself within a quantifying and analytical, rather than a synthetic world. Art has become so individualized that the commonly accepted structures required for communication are almost irrelevant. This calls for a true reappraisal – not just of the role of the artist, as this is merely a symptom of the need for a renaissance of synthetic thinking – for otherwise another cultural dark age will be upon us.

We need a goal that is ultimately unattainable: ‘whole-sense’. Full knowledge of the whole is clearly impossible, yet it is only with this ‘whole-sense’ that any part is effectively comprehensible. We must move towards this goal by way of intellectual intuition. Intellectual intuition is both active and passive, objective and subjective; it merely re-combines what we have unsuccessfully attempted to separate. That whole-sense would then integrate different levels of perception, avoiding reductionist answers and operating a constant and never wholly definable hypothesis.

Intellectual intuition combines the processes of the internal and external models of an illusionary reality, undergoing a constant transformation, which is only comprehensible with the use of pattern.

Pattern structures our thinking – even more so: pattern is the structure of our thinking – therefore to evolve our knowledge of pattern is also to evolve ourselves. We need a feeling for pattern if we are to understand more fully how to build a model continuum beyond our present modes of internal model making. It will still require the concept of ‘model’, as all ‘facts’ are subjective – that is, affected by the structure of the mind receiving those facts. We can only know what we are physically capable of knowing – ultimately the mind cannot know its simultaneous self; we cannot jump over our own knees…

A fundamental conceptual pattern must be abstracted from the ever-changing view of reality to allow a smooth trans-formation to take place on the basis of new in-formation…

Pattern → Thought → Pattern

If we are aware of the integrative pattern of experience, and our involvement in the basic rhythms of being, we may begin to maximize our potential controlling or exploiting even of those aspects of our psychophysical selves, which we have yet fully to examine.

This integrative pattern is now within our current cosmology, a multi-dimensional continuum without scale, seen as complex, appearing almost random, often sensed rather than known, a projection of our common experience/knowledge. It is rewarding only in so far as we are able to be aware of our involvement in it – to understand and therefore to order and thus give meaning to the dynamic pattern of our existence, through a way of thinking.

^[1] G.H. Hardy (1940). A mathematician’s apology. Electronic edition (March 2005), University of Alberta Mathematical Sciences Society, p. 13-14, http://www.math.ualberta.ca/~mss/books/A%20Mathematician's%20Apology.pdf. Retrieved: 27 February 2006.