Wittgenstein 6. Patterns

There was another topic in my first article about Wittgenstein – about the meaning of a word/sentence coming from its usage – which I would like to expound upon today.

There are two activities each of us is involved all the time: pattern recognition and automatic decision making. We do it all the time, every moment, automatically.

Both were developed and tuned over millions of years, so we are very good in both of these activities. The only problem is that most of those millions of years we lived surrounded by danger – hunger, cold, deadly diseases, wild animals – so, our automatic behavior is primarily danger-oriented. We just cannot help but watch like hawks for any real or perceived threats. Each of us is a compressed spring, ready to act. Those who were not ready did not survive. So, here we are – finely tuned survivors.

By the way, have you noticed that science is driven by the pleasure we derive from discovering new patterns (laws) and reducing many different patterns (laws) to a more general one? We justify the science funding by rational explanation: science helps engineering. This is because engineering does not require additional justification. We are immersed in the fruitful engineering results. We live and breathe easier thanks to the brilliant engineers and many practical people learning from them. 

Together, these two activities (pattern recognition and automatic decision making) create a foundation for our third activity of explaining (rationalizing) our decisions and whatever we observe – all the time, never pausing. Most of this third activity is done automatically too. Yet some of it we do consciously, sometimes with great effort, trying to “understand” – to discover the pattern and to explain it in terms of the already existing knowledge. We use the already well-known patterns to explain new ones, enhance the existing patterns, and add the new ones if there is no known existing pattern that matches our new experience. This way we keep our knowledge – the world model, which is also a pattern, even if a huge and complicated one – updated and ready to be used for predictions and decision making.

If there is no input from the outside world, we keep analyzing the internal signals – we have dreams at night or during the day (daydreaming). Those, who voluntarily went into an echo chamber that isolates from the external world, reported being overwhelmed by the bodily and thought noise coming from inside.

The automatic systems helped us to survive, but can be also exploited. In the hands of skillful manipulators – including our glorious advertisement machine and political propaganda – we become their willing followers, whether we acknowledge it or not. One just cannot help it. The myths built by those powerful marketing and ideological machines are part of our world. As kids, we grow with them, accept them as given, and internalize them carrying this legacy way into our adulthood, until one day a painful disillusionment strips some of it.

As human species (or any species of the animal kingdom for that matter), we also used to be very busy, driven by the necessity – to find food, shelter, to escape danger. But for the last few thousand years – a blink of an eye on an evolutionary scale – we find ourselves in a much safer world with much more leisure time on our hands. Our automatic systems did not have a chance to adjust yet, so we keep intently staring in the darkness, afraid of monsters, and kill our body by feeding it too much food and by the lack of physical activity. We just did not have enough food and leisure before.    

Now, what is it to do with Wittgenstein?

For me, he was the first who opened my eyes to the fact that the meaning of the word/sentence comes from its usage, from the context, from specific examples. Before reading him, I assumed it was possible to have a word definition, we just have not discovered them yet in many cases. Oh, our “obvious” assumptions! They are the source of our biggest mistakes.

When I have read Philosophical Investigations, I realized that our pattern-based activity (which is at the base of all our activities) operates using ideas and solutions that come from the generalization (pattern recognition) of specific facts. We are bombarded by various – often contradictory – facts which we are trying to put together into a cohesive world view. 

You maybe heard the advice of keeping yourself from the temptation of immediate resolving contradictions in order to find a new original solution. It is especially popular in science. Now it makes sense to me. By keeping in the view many diverse facts without resolution we give our automatic systems a chance to come up with a new pattern – the achievement that can help us to understand the world better, to make better decisions, and easier achieve our goals (or adjust them to be more realistic). It can also earn us high praise from our pattern-seeking fellow humans, which is one of the social motivations, isn’t it? 

Thank you, Herr Wittgenstein, for helping to understand how we operate!