Through the year that this blog has been around, pattern recognition has been one of the primary topics discussed. A great example is the seemingly random construction of poetry which the mind can take and construct meaning from. This is a truly powerful tool. The capabilities of machines to infer meaning is exceedingly limited - Sure, there are semantic descriptions and machine learning algorithms to be able to probabilistically determine what might be inferred or entailed by a sentence, but really the whole thing is still in its infancy.
The brain though can construct patterns from anywhere, with anything. No where (to my knowledge) is this idea explored more beautifully than in William Gibson's novel "Idoru." The novel center's around Colin Laney, a man with a unique talent for sifting through data to find "Nodal points" - the patterns in the noise. Through this he comes to the attention of Rez - aging rock star - and meets the most interesting of all creations: Rei Toei, the Idoru. Throughout the novel Gibson explores the implications of a brain with an unfettered talent for pattern recognition, and how the massive amount of information presented to us now and in the future will affect our brains ability to construct meaningful patterns.
It's bloody brilliant.
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