Preface
This moment-by-moment feeling of receiving information, committing it to memory and then finally understanding a situation some time after the event is what really has always intrigued me.
Living Patterns has since become my 'go-to' method for helping me to understand new information quickly, without having to 'unlock' every single piece of information or fully understand everything that comes my way.
I am a veteran British 'Full Stack Developer' (computer programmer) and independent researcher.
Most of my life I have lived in and around the small market town of Pershore, located on the edge of the Cotswolds
As well as my research and development work, I spend my time with my family, Schutzhund (utility dog training), alternative music, hiking and cinema.
My life involves a lot of 'internal reasoning', and I just find it a lot easier having a framework to track the various mental artifacts in my brain and think more in terms of patterns than individual chunks of data.
Beyond everyday life, I can think of many applications for the model we are going to be using. Education, health and social care, business, politics, art, research and so forth are all good candidates, but I think one of the most interesting applications for me is technology, and in particular Artificial Intelligence, (AI).
Talking at a recent event, British-Canadian computer scientist and cognitive psychologist, Geoffrey Hinton talked about the “existential threat” of AI:
Living Patterns presents a practical and holistic model for rethinking everyday life using just three basic elements, or lenses:...we haven't got them doing internal reasoning, but that will come and once they start doing internal reasoning to check for the consistency between the different things they believe, then they'll get much smarter and they will be able to do thought experiements.
And one reason they haven't got this internal reasoning is because they've been trained from inconsistent data.
And so it's very hard for them to do reasoning because they've be trained on all these inconsistent beliefs.
Well, I think they're going to have to be trained so they say, you know, if I have this ideology then this is true and if I have that ideology, then that is true. And once they're trained like that, within an ideology, they're going to be able to try and get consistency and so we're going to get [...] the equivalent of reasoning, and it's going to get much better.
- Causes: How we try to reason using simplified images of nature.
- Complexities: How we adapt our ideas when new knowledge is produced.
- Coordination: How we are motivated by raw sensory experience.
Mat K. Witts
England 2024