I think the most repulsive concept is this idea that your will
to find confirmation in the World is somehow of secondary importance to the
World Itself, as though the Reality of your Immediate Experience were somehow
separate from the World. I don’t know how it is exactly that people wrap
their heads around this, how they manage to hold these contradictory ideas in
their minds, at once having strong conviction in what they feel to be a real
pattern, and yet at the same time denying that it’s real. That’s really what it
comes down to; it comes down to a schizophrenic separation between one’s self
and the World.
The fact of the matter is that, when you observe a pattern, it’s
like in music: it’s a Motif. There is a theme that is essentially very small: a
small detail that comes out of the general woodwork of whatever you’re
observing.
Let’s say that what you’re observing is a Work of Art, such as a
work of visual media, such as a movie or a television show. Clearly, everything
about that is just as contrived as a symphony. If you could recognize a theme,
a pattern, in a symphony, you wouldn’t presume on the Unreality of this pattern
because you know that the notes are there; the pattern’s there, and you
can infer the intentionality of the composer from the presence of the notes.
Now, whether or not the composer was aware that he or she was doing this
is beside the point. A great deal of music is just improvised, but the fact of
the matter is that the pattern recurs, and we call it a theme and we analyze it
and we notice it, and it has an objective reality in our communication.
It’s the same thing with writing. Any creative writing is every
bit as artificial as a composition, and it’s every bit as REAL as well; it is
just a series of phenomena. If you don’t put any EXCESSIVE labels upon it, if
you don’t weigh it against this sort of naïve realism, then everything that you
experience when you watch a movie is real, as a movie, just as a
composition is real as a composition. If you’re talking about the Qualities
of the Art, it is quite obvious that the finest art will have certain
underlying patterns which are called “subtext”. The patterns aren’t ever given
to you overtly. They’re not given to you authoritatively. They are Easter Eggs;
they’re hidden. The more you pay attention to them willfully, the more you will
notice them. The more you will notice them, the more you’ll want to believe
that this pattern, which is in your mind (and you register it as “in your mind”)
has an external Reality to it, and the more evidence you will find for it.
To my mind, that proves that it exists.
That is Absolute Confirmation.
That is Absolute Truth.
And I don’t know how it is that people manage somehow to be swindled
out of the Truth, to be told that because they have such a passion for the
pursuit of the Truth that somehow that invalidates them.
By contrast with what? The entirety of the Scientific Method is
a series of pattern recognition. So it is also with Learning, and anyone who
participates in the Scientific Method has to be educated in order to attain
that sort of status.
The process of Education is Pattern Recognition. You can
understand how a pattern works. You can point out certain tropes that a writer
uses which are peculiar to that particular Universe in which that writer is
operating. For instance, in the Breaking Bad universe, or the Better
Call Saul universe, which are essentially the same, there are a series of
tropes, chiefly mathematical and based in colour, which recur as means of
illustrating themes, covertly. However, wherever they predominate, the writer
will oftentimes hint at their presence by having a scene wherein colour plays
an essential role or wherein mathematics play an essential role, hinting the mind
which is sufficiently curious to start paying attention to that pattern. Of
course, some of us have been paying attention to it already, and by that point,
it’s simply evidence.
Now, the way that this process of Revelation occurs is quite
simple. Your mind forms a conscious map of the stimuli – the input – that you’re
getting from watching this show. The moment you turn it on, you are immersed in
the World, you are getting all this visual input, and your mind is experiencing
it as a Reality. If you begin to notice this pattern, your map has been updated
to suit that pattern. Now, should the pattern be disrupted, the map will stay
there, much like data on your computer does even after it is deleted, until
there is some sort of evidence presented that would suggest that the pattern
was never “really Real”. But just as most things that are deleted on your computer
can be retrieved, most of these patterns cannot really be negated. They cannot
really be overwritten; they’re just there. The question is: how important are
they? If they’re not important enough to remember, then you’ll tend to
deprioritize them.
Fact of the matter is: if you were desperate, for some
reason or another, to find confirmation for this pattern, and the pattern were
not there, if you were biased by an inferior impulse, (something lesser
than the pursuit of the Truth, as an end in and of itself,) then sooner or
later you would be disappointed, and you might be inclined to discard the map
entirely regardless of the evidence substantiating it.
This is what people do, also, willfully; this is something we
have to take responsibility for.
[({Dm.A.A.)}]
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