Patterns, worlds and bunnies

Magoo's post "Which Patterns are Good to Eat?" raised some new dimensions of Hayles' work for me, so of course I'm going to devote more words to pattern versus absence. The example of a the bunny and carrot is an interesting one, particularly because it depends on the primacy of an external reality. It is provocative that the bunny does not percieve the carrot as a carrot until smell compliments vision, at which point the "noise" becomes a tasty "pattern." The interesting thing here is that presence seems to separate from pattern as the bunny momentarily fails to represent the carrot.

Of course, we all know that there is a carrot there in front of the bunny that the little critter just isn't seeing. However, from the bunny's perspective, the carrot is absent one moment and present the next. Without a God's-eye view of the events, presence looks much more like pattern, and here I think the full force of Magoo's and Hayles' thought hits home.

Taking another example, consider something like radio waves. We can't see, feel or otherwise experience them through our senses, but we know what they are. Still, few would say that radio waves or other forms of electromagnetic radiation don't exist because we have no sense (I was about to say "unmediated," but that fell through) experience of them. It seems that we have a kind of second-order pattern here that we form in the same way that we create an abstract concept like "love" or fictional character. Not only is there no guarantee that the pattern we percieve represents what is actually present, but we can add non-existant things to that pattern, from imaginary friends to literary criticism.

Now, I'm starting to push that infinite regression again, so it's probably time to return to technology. What we see on a screen is pattern, and usually (take for instance this blog) the pattern has no correspondence to physical presence (here I resist the urge to digress into what kinds of things a blog or website does represent, but I'll save it for another post). It is true that what we percieve is already imperfectly mediated by our senses, as illustrated by the bunny. However, we can remove ourselves much further from the present world as we spin off into abstract thought or cyberspace. I think here we refind to the cautionary note in Hayles and Joyce that I wrote on before. As we become more reliant on pattern than on presence, we turn inward towards our own perceptions. I think that there is less danger that we fail to see the carrot than that we become unable to distinguish the real carrots from the virtual ones.