Which Patterns are Good to Eat?

Night Owl's recent piece on Hayles and pattern raises some interesting points. Hayles' dichotomy between pattern and noise seems fundamental to our neurology. I recall reading in some piece of pop science about an experiment with rabbits.

(Maybe someone with some neurological or cogsci background could extend this or improve it)

The experimenter would draw a carrot before the bunny's nose. When the bunny didn't inhale, the pattern in said bunny's olfactory lobe was stochaic. (For stochaic, think something like snow on a TV set or "white noise" on the radio; it's not technically random, but that's the way we generally take it). When the bunny inhaled, the increased input stimulated a set of waves that crossed back and forth through the olfactory lobe. A different stimulus produced a different pattern.

To return from the rabbit to Hayles, both seem to respond to a global gestalt of pattern, and to a judgment that certain pattern only qualifies as noise (although, yes, I did notice that Hayles responds more articulately).

Hayles' noise seems to correspond pretty directly to previous discussion of absence, particularly Derrida's, starting in "Plato's Pharmacy." And I assume that the rabbit's take on the stochaic pattern would read something like "Oh, nothing much is happening" -- or an absence of sorts: better yet, a perceived absence in terms of smell. Better even yet -- more better! -- a perceived absence of smell in the midst of a plenum of smells.

What I wonder about is to what extent pattern becomes noise as it's reframed, and, with that, to what extent pattern amounts to framed noise.

How much does Derrida's "eternal play of signifiers" change if the question is not (or not only) absence but pattern?

What about patterns that have only partly arrived?

Has any pattern completely arrived?

It seems we have to create an edge or frame or limit, but then we keep re-creating different edges, and then we set the remembered conclusions of all of these, and frame them for further analysis.

This makes me wonder about the discussion of truth in blogging (among other things) in "my best friend is a blog" recently.

Truth feels to me more like harmony, less like reality every day.