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LTT: Tadeusz Zawidzki - Pattern Finding and Pattern Making

Abstract: Human beings are proficient pattern finders (e.g., scientific laws), and pattern makers (e.g., art, architecture, political systems). According to philosophical tradition, going back at least to Aristotle, these different capacities are made possible by fundamentally distinct cognitive competencies: theoretical vs. practical reason. But some of our most effective pattern making succeeds precisely because it masquerades as pattern finding: ideologies concerning, e.g., gender, race, and class, consist in unsupported claims about found patterns which, in virtue of widespread acceptance, partially make themselves true (Haslanger 2012). Thus, it is hard to classify expressions of ideology (whether public or private) in terms of the traditional disjunction between theoretical and practical reason. In this paper, I argue that recent “active inference” models of human cognition (Hohwy 2013; Clark 2016, 2020; Parr, Pezzulo & Friston, 2022) suggest a promising response to this problem. According to these models, the brain is concerned mainly with minimizing the discrepancy between expected and detected information. It does this by responding to such discrepancies in one of two ways: (1) updating its models of the world (pattern finding), or (2) changing the world to better fit its current models (pattern making). The strategy the brain chooses in any particular case depends on indefinitely many contextual factors that determine which option minimizes the discrepancy most efficiently. When it comes to the social world, for many reasons, strategy (2) is often more efficient (and effective) than strategy (1). This is why ideologies abound in human social experience.