I'm not entirely sure I agree "everything is made of pattern".
You choose to differ?
Pattern is a human concept, just like "chronology" -- and "similarity", "difference", and "choice" for that matter. These are all, to some extent, anthropomorphic terms. ... But still, one unavoidably has to use words to convey meaning, or at least, one's own particular understanding of things. Words denote concepts, and all words are, to a greater or lesser extent, mere approximations, ways to talk about the dashboard of dials materialists think of as the real world.
Now you're speaking my language! Words have definitions (boundaries) and as such they are all examples of choosing to include or exclude from a set. Choosing to highlight similarities and ignore differences or highlight differences and ignore similarities. Everything real is a metaphor.
If we're trying to choose the best primitive notions, the best words, that give us the broadest insight into reality, what words should we choose that we can find them in everything else? What words we choose as our primitive notions influence how we see the world, so they are important to us even if they are not literally a chronology of creation which has no beginning or end.
Materialists have chosen "material" as their primitive notion which is an extrapolation of the sensory perception of hardness, heaviness, immobility, deadness, rock-likeness. This is their primitive notion because they have emphasized the objective aspect of reality. This began as a kind of humility: let's take out our biases and recognize that reality doesn't change on our wishes and whims and let's see what patterns we can observe if we stop assuming reality is as capricious as we are and is instead assume it is firm, solid, unyielding to whimsy.
Idealists choose "consciousness" or "mind" as their primitive notion which is an emphasis on the subjective and the need for a observer, but since our minds are capricious, ever-changing, easily deceived, this undercuts the solidity that is desired by the materialists and indeed the apparent solidity confirmed by our observations that the universe does seem to behave very regularly according to "laws" and does not seem to have the capricious element typically associated with consciousness. (Or at least if it does have this capricious element it is systematically removed from observation by the scientific method which requires something be repeatable to be confirmed.)
I have chosen "pattern" as the primitive notion which emphasizes both equally and assigns an essential role to choice. Materialists deny real choice even exists and Idealists have to explain why the universe "chooses" to do the same thing a near infinite number of times without being capricious.
By assigning choice an essential role - a select seat in the triumvirate of primitive notions - we establish the path towards power struggles and we infuse the universe with both meaning and frustration. Sin, judgment, righteousness, evil, feedback loops, truth as a tool, lies as manipulation, etc... all the messy human stuff enters our philosophy if we give choice a seat.
It isn't like I'm the first to notice this... It's in the Adam and Eve story... its in Pandora's box.
If M@L isn't metaconscious, its mental processes may not be anything like that of its dissociated alters.
It must bear some similarities and some differences to the processes of our own minds, right?
If BK is right, what we can perceive of M@L's inner mental processes is what (from across a dissociated boundary) it looks like, or we model as, agglomerations of matter at various scales -- from the submicroscopic to galaxy clusters to the whole universe. It has patterns (yes, I know -- your word) and regularities that have become the topic that scientists seek to perceive and describe, or at any rate should seek to do so.
I don't disagree with this at all. This is an old concept. The idea that we are inside the mind of a dreamer who isn't fully aware that he is dreaming. I am heavily influenced in my thinking by the hermetic principles, one of which is: all is mind.
BUT... if we stick to the same metaphors only, then we limit ourselves. Technology gives us new metaphors. The simulation and the neural network are new metaphors. One day they will be old too and something else will come up. Your brain is a neural network. Your brain can generate fantastically complex imagery just by focusing on one word. A GAN (generative adversarial network) can be trained to generate fantastically complex imagery just from inputting one word. So we can say the objective world is really just the dream of a dreamer or the dissociated mental process of M@L or the simulated environment of an unimaginably complex network of computations.
A lot of the time (I exclude most engineering since that demonstrably has to work to be taken seriously), they don't. Rather they make stuff up, allow themselves to think it's real, and go looking for any evidence, however preposterous, to support it. Confirmation bias gone mad.
I agree. But a lot of this is explained by what I said above about materialists starting out with the assumption that everything is rock-like as a matter of humility and making the assumption the universe is not capricious (a mind-like quality). The scientific method then systematically removes any data that is not repeatable, so if there was a capricious aspect to the universe science would be blind to it.
I'm not suggesting that you approve of this kind of thing, of course. But bottom line, I don't accept your most basic premise about pattern. As I see it, that's just a word for how you're thinking about an aspect of consciousness, which you then go on to subdivide into three categories and develop your thesis from.
Yes it is just a word, but so is "consciousness" or "mind". You could take ANY word, make it the FIRST word, and it implies the whole. (Just write an explanation of any word. Then write an explanation of the explanation. And so on... and three steps in you'll have to describe the whole universe).
But what word gives you the shortest path or fewest steps to describing the whole? Or conversely, take any object or experience and deconstruct it or reduce it to one word and what is the shortest path?
BK's analytical idealism, though it may turn out to be not entirely correct, strikes me personally as more consistent and rigorous, having the benefit of increasing amounts of verified evidence.
We seem to be saying similar things, we're just choosing different ways of saying it... ;-)
You're entitled to your thesis, of course, and I respect that, but I simply don't agree.
You may choose to differ.
Good to see a little humour. In the end, either or neither of us may be right.
I have defined terms so vague as to be universally applicable and therefore I can never wrong! What we may differ on is the utility of it.
BK has done the same thing you just have to get through an extra layer of definitions of terms to see it so I think it is a harder sell, requires more mental energy and therefore is less useful.