Perceiving Patterns

Isn't it surprisingly human to seek for patterns in a chaotic world? Douglas Hofstadter tries to do exactly this with naturally or synthetically occurring sequences of numbers in his book "Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies". Recognizing patterns in the natural environment around us is a viable part of cognition and Hofstadter goes as far as calling it the potential key to intelligence. It comes into play in everyday use as grouping of letters in written language, sounds to meaningful spoken words, perception of geometric structures according to the Gestalt Laws.

Yet, Hofstadter concentrates on stripped down, purely mathematical sequences of numbers which can mostly be explained by repeating the same generation pattern (in his words: templates) over and over. And even though the mathematical construct standing behind such generative sequences, including arithmetic expressions and numbers, was arbitrarily thought up by humans, this kind of miraculous sense-seeking works for the most random sequences. Therefore it is easy to believe in some kind of higher power like Mathgod ("Zahlengott"), Einstein supposedly described as cagey but not wicked.

No matter how random something might be, if you break down the problem in finite space, there always seems to be a pattern emerging from it. I am just not that sure whether there actually can be patterns to all irrational sequences. Because once you thought you figured out the template behind the nth number of permutations, there might be a ‘n+1’th packet that screws up the previous template all together.