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.

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.