I want to do something a bit different for this edition of the Grab Bag, and that is to introduce you to a concept I ran across back in the 60's, one that has stayed with me and bemused me ever since.
It's the idea of Pattern Integrity, and it comes from the amazing mind of R. Buckminster Fuller, the genius philosopher and inventor who gave us geodesic domes*, the idea of Spaceship Earth, and the Dymaxion automobile and house designs - very 60's stuff.
Anyhow, Pattern Integrity. Here's Claire Evans, writing in ScienceBlogs in 2008, with a great description:
"Imagine you have a length of nylon rope, which you splice into a length of cotton rope, then into another length of hemp rope. If you tie an overhand knot in the rope, and push it down, through all three kinds of ropes, the knot remains a knot. The material is irrelevant, because the knot is just a pattern that has a specific set of guidelines for itself. Fuller wrote that “a pattern has an integrity independent of the medium by virtue of which you have received the information that it exists.” That is to say, if you push the knot all the way to the end of the rope, until it falls off the end, there’s no more knot, but the pattern integrity of “knot” remains the same.
People, Fuller argued, are the same way: our cells constantly regenerate, leaving us rarely made up of the same stuff from one moment to the next. Our pattern integrity — our identity, if you will, or our personhood — never changes, even if the material substrate does: “every human is a unique pattern integrity temporarily given shape by flesh.”
I have spent countless hours down this rabbit hole ever since I first read Fuller, and while I haven't come up with any answers to the really big questions - like "What are we, really?" - the concept of Pattern Integrity has provided an interesting tool for thought, as well as considerable astonishment at its ubiquity all around us. Once you start looking, you see it everywhere.
*In another strange case of real estate synchronicity, I'm showing a dome house this afternoon.
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