Pattern Humanism, Calibrating the Biological PRM to Trace and Preserve Universal Patterns- First Part

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The book “Pattern Humanism: Calibrating the Biological PRM to Trace and Preserve Universal Patterns” is a collection of 46 interconnected philosophical essays exploring the biological origins of cognition, the persistence of informational patterns, artificial intelligence, the constructed Self, and the technologically managed stable decline of modern civilisation.

Ayolov, P. (2026) Pattern Humanism: Calibrating the Biological PRM to Trace and Preserve Universal Patterns. Amazon. ASIN:B0HNL8WH8J

Abstract

Who possesses the authority to explain the world, and what happens when explanations become instruments for manufacturing reality? Beginning with Arthur Jensen’s corporate sermon in Paddy Chayefsky’s Network (1976), this article examines how financial, political, academic and technological institutions transform partial knowledge of recurrent relationships into claims of universal sovereignty. Against Jensen’s reduction of existence to monetary circulation, Pattern Humanism identifies a wider field of structural regularities manifested through mathematics, beauty, music, love, mythology, storytelling and economic exchange. Edgar Allan Poe’s William Legrand and the cinematic figure of Neo introduce the epistemological problem of recognising hidden organisation beneath familiar appearances, while B. F. Skinner’s behaviourism, Noam Chomsky’s linguistic critique and contemporary Large Language Models expose the distinction between behavioural prediction and moral prescription. George Carlin’s confrontation with euphemism and institutional language subsequently becomes an exercise in critical recognition: the Concrete Man’s right to call bullshit whenever a representation claims authority over the reality it merely describes. Reconsidering Heidegger’s critique of Humanism and Sartre’s existential freedom, the article proposes the Purple Pill as a refusal of both ideological submission and the fantasy of omniscient escape. McLuhan’s externalisation of human memory, Harari’s analogy of algorithmic cattle and Pelevin’s Methuselah’s Lamp lead towards a final historical proposition: technological acceleration need not produce universal integration or revolutionary transformation, but may instead accompany the prolonged deterioration of competing civilisational formations. Pattern Humanism consequently rejects the identification of prediction with destiny. Its purpose is not to calculate an inevitable future, but to recognise, investigate and critically interpret the tendencies through which material and historical relationships continue to develop.

Keywords

Pattern Humanism; Manufacturing Bullshit; Planned Obsolescence of Meaning; Arthur Jensen; Network; Paddy Chayefsky; Edgar Allan Poe; The Gold-Bug; Ratiocination; The Matrix; B. F. Skinner; Skinner Paradox; Noam Chomsky; Large Language Models; George Carlin; Philosophy of Language; Concrete Man; Martin Heidegger; Jean-Paul Sartre; Purple Pill; Marshall McLuhan; Externalised Memory; Yuval Noah Harari; Algorithmic Cattle; Victor Pelevin; Methuselah’s Lamp; Samuel Huntington; Francis Fukuyama; Neal Stephenson; Civilisational Fragmentation; Perpetual Stable Decay; Pattern Recognition.

Introduction: You Have Meddled with the Primal Forces of Nature, Mr Beale!

“The world is a college of corporations, inexorably determined by the immutable bylaws of business.”

Paddy Chayefsky, 1976, Network

In the dark corporate Valhalla of Sidney Lumet’s Network (1976), Arthur Jensen summons the television prophet Howard Beale to explain a universe whose organisation supposedly exceeds the comprehension of ordinary human beings. The room darkens, the executive rises, and the language of international finance suddenly acquires the terrifying authority of a religious revelation. Dollars, petrodollars, roubles, pounds and shekels become the elementary particles of an invisible cosmos, moving through international transactions according to an ebb and flow Jensen describes through the imagery of tidal gravity. Nations, political loyalties, democratic institutions and ideological confrontations dissolve into the larger circulation of monetary power. Capitalism and communism become superficial distinctions within an encompassing architecture of calculation; political leaders cease to appear as sovereign historical actors and become administrators of arrangements whose operations transcend the vocabulary through which their populations understand the world. Jensen has apparently achieved an extraordinary intellectual transformation: he can see the relationships that others cannot, and because he recognises their operation, he believes himself entitled to explain the ultimate meaning of existence. His corporate sermon culminates in a promise of universal tranquillity, a planetary holding company capable of eliminating conflict by organising the economic purposes of everybody within a common system of consumption, employment and managed satisfaction. But Jensen’s revelation contains an immense philosophical fraud. He has discovered the power of interconnected relationships and immediately confused their particular financial manifestation with the fundamental constitution of reality. His corporate cosmology does not reveal the primal forces of nature; it appropriates their language to confer metaphysical authority upon a temporary historical arrangement. The circulation of money is real, but money did not invent circulation.

Financial systems depend upon relationships of exchange, expectation, scarcity, obligation, communication and trust that cannot be reduced to the currencies through which particular societies organise them. Nor do these relationships exhaust the forms of organisation through which existence becomes recognisable. A musical composition discloses recurrence, interval, contrast and variation without becoming a financial transaction; a painting can generate beauty through asymmetry and dissonance without corresponding to an economic equilibrium; a myth preserves arrangements of memory, conflict and transformation across generations; a story acquires recognisable architecture through the relationships between characters, events, expectation and consequence; and love emerges through embodied attachments whose emotional reality cannot be replaced by a statistical description of interpersonal behaviour. These phenomena are neither identical substances nor interchangeable currencies, yet each reveals relational structures that can recur through different circumstances without belonging exclusively to their present manifestations. The profound mistake is to elevate one form of organisation into the sovereign explanation of all others. Jensen's supposedly universal revelation is therefore a magnificent demonstration of how an institution manufactures bullshit: it identifies a genuine relationship, surrounds it with the language of inevitability, suppresses the limits of its own perspective and finally presents its interpretation as the natural order of existence.

The question arising from this spectacle is not simply whether Jensen is lying, because the most effective forms of manufactured authority rarely depend upon propositions that are entirely false. They depend upon the selective arrangement of recognisable truths into explanatory systems whose authority exceeds the evidence supporting them. Jensen correctly perceives that economic transactions connect otherwise distant institutions, that individual intentions cannot determine every consequence of collective organisation, and that political rhetoric frequently conceals relationships operating beneath its declared purposes. His error begins when the instrument through which he recognises those relationships becomes indistinguishable from the reality being recognised. The financial network is transformed into the architecture of existence, and the executive who possesses privileged knowledge of its operation becomes a self-appointed interpreter of universal necessity. Who, then, has the ability to see what Jensen claims to see? More importantly, what distinguishes the recognition of an actual relationship from the manufacture of an imaginary explanation? The human organism has evolved remarkable capacities for distinguishing recurrence from variation, anticipating environmental changes, recognising faces and voices, remembering sequences, interpreting movements and coordinating action through accumulated experience. Such capacities make survival possible, but they also create the conditions for extraordinarily elaborate mistakes. The observer who identifies a recurring arrangement may imagine a hidden intention behind it; the institution that discovers a useful correlation may proclaim an immutable law; the political movement that recognises a historical resemblance may mistake the resemblance for proof of an inevitable future. Even the language of scientific explanation can become a machinery of unwarranted certainty when the success of a particular model is confused with comprehensive knowledge of the processes it represents. The danger intensifies when the same institutions capable of describing behaviour acquire the technological means to influence it, manufacturing the circumstances under which their predictions become increasingly plausible.

The corporation studies desire and reorganises its commercial environment; the political apparatus classifies populations and subsequently governs through those classifications; the digital platform measures attention while continuously altering the informational conditions under which attention is distributed. Recognition becomes intervention, intervention modifies the relationships being recognised, and the institution mistakes the increasing compatibility between its models and their consequences for confirmation of its supposedly superior understanding. Yet the concrete individual living within these arrangements does not disappear merely because his actions have become measurable. His existence remains biological, historically situated, sensorially immediate and irreducible to the administrative representations produced in his name. Neither the grammatical abstraction called Humanity nor the institution claiming to act on its behalf possesses the eyes, nervous system or lived experience through which recognition actually occurs. This is where Pattern Humanism separates itself from Jensen's corporate theology. Its purpose is not to discover another universal proprietor of existence, to replace financial determinism with mathematical mysticism, or to promise that sufficiently sophisticated intelligence will eventually calculate every consequence of human action. It begins with the more difficult task of distinguishing observable organisation from the representations through which that organisation is described, predicted, exploited and occasionally misunderstood. Before anyone claims to possess the future, there is a more fundamental problem: how can an individual learn to recognise the structures concealed beneath familiar appearances without mistaking the resulting knowledge for mastery over the world? That question leads beyond Jensen's boardroom, towards a cryptogram hidden in an old parchment and a man who suddenly sees the code behind the visible world.

Part I: The Eyes That See the Matrix: From Jensen’s Corporate Vision to Poe’s Ratiocination and Neo’s Code

“The solution is by no means so difficult as you might be led to imagine from the first hasty inspection of the characters.”

Edgar Allan Poe, 1843, The Gold-Bug

The most disturbing feature of Arthur Jensen’s corporate revelation is not that he possesses an exceptionally sophisticated understanding of international finance, but that his knowledge becomes a form of power over those who cannot recognise the relationships through which their lives are organised. Howard Beale sees political nations, public institutions, ideological conflicts and the apparent freedom of individual choice; Jensen sees flows of capital, networks of dependency, exchanges of ownership and mechanisms through which human conduct can be translated into economic transactions. One man observes the visible furniture of civilisation, while the other claims to recognise the invisible architecture holding it together. This difference makes Jensen dangerous, since the capacity to understand how something functions also creates opportunities to influence those who understand only its appearances. He can sell things to men and men to things because he recognises the relations between desire, information, representation and exchange, while the individuals participating in those relations ordinarily encounter them as separate experiences. A consumer perceives an attractive product rather than the elaborate machinery producing its desirability; an employee recognises a salary rather than the complete network of financial obligations determining its value; a citizen encounters a political decision without necessarily perceiving the economic dependencies shaping its formulation. Yet Jensen's superiority remains relative, not absolute. He understands particular arrangements through institutional access, accumulated knowledge and a specialised vocabulary whose explanatory authority cannot be extended without qualification to the entirety of existence.

The distinction becomes clearer through Edgar Allan Poe's The Gold-Bug (1843), where William Legrand encounters an apparently insignificant parchment whose obscure markings conceal a cryptographic message. What initially appears accidental becomes intelligible through a disciplined investigation of relationships between signs. Legrand examines recurring characters, identifies their relative frequencies, considers the structural organisation of language and reconstructs an encrypted sequence that would remain meaningless to someone treating its symbols as unrelated marks. His remarkable discovery depends not upon possessing supernatural knowledge but upon refusing the assumption that the immediately visible exhausts the intelligible. The crucial difference between Legrand and Jensen emerges in their treatment of evidence. Legrand eventually reveals the reasoning behind his solution, allowing the apparent miracle to become an examinable procedure; Jensen demands recognition of a system whose ultimate authority he simply declares. Legrand's method is fallible, reproducible and open to correction, while Jensen's pronouncement attempts to make disagreement appear equivalent to ignorance of reality itself. This opposition reveals a fundamental distinction between recognising organisation and manufacturing authority from the recognition. A successful interpretation identifies relationships capable of explaining observations that previously appeared disconnected; an ideological interpretation begins to exceed its evidence when it presents the resulting explanation as the only possible account of existence. Neither money nor a cryptogram discloses its organisation merely because someone looks at it. Seeing requires distinctions, comparisons, memory, inference and the willingness to revise an interpretation when details resist it. The extraordinary significance of Legrand's achievement is therefore methodological rather than mystical: he demonstrates that what appears unintelligible may become understandable without ceasing to be materially ordinary. The parchment contains no revelation addressed to an exceptional soul. Its characters acquire meaning through relationships that can be reconstructed by an embodied observer capable of distinguishing a meaningful sequence from accidental variation. The treasure is almost secondary to the intellectual operation that makes its discovery possible. The greater discovery is the existence of an intelligible structure beneath a seemingly arbitrary arrangement of signs.

The cinematic imagination would eventually transform this act of decipherment into one of the defining visual experiences of the digital age. In The Matrix (1999), Neo initially encounters a world whose objects, environments and inhabitants appear as naturally given as those of ordinary experience. Buildings possess solidity, bodies experience pain, movements obey familiar physical expectations, and the apparent continuity of everyday life conceals the computational processes generating the simulation. When Neo finally perceives the cascading numerical and symbolic structures beneath its rendered appearances, the familiar world does not simply vanish; its mode of intelligibility changes. The visible object becomes recognisable as the result of operations previously hidden by the interface. A wall is no longer merely a wall, and an approaching bullet no longer possesses the unquestionable authority of an independently existing physical event within that simulated environment. Yet this cinematic revelation must be distinguished from the claim that the physical universe is itself generated by computer instructions. Neo discovers executable code because his fictional world is an engineered simulation; nothing in the success of mathematical physics establishes that material existence possesses the same architecture. What the scene makes philosophically valuable is the distinction between encountering an appearance and investigating the processes responsible for its production. Legrand deciphers a deliberately encrypted message, while Neo recognises an artificial environment whose familiar surfaces conceal another level of organisation. Jensen, by contrast, interprets actual financial relationships through a conceptual system that has become so encompassing that he cannot distinguish its historical limitations from the supposed necessities of nature. The three figures therefore disclose different possibilities of intellectual sight. One discovers a concealed message through evidence; another acquires extraordinary perceptual access within a fictional computational world; the third converts privileged institutional knowledge into a claim of universal authority. These differences matter because contemporary technological culture increasingly invites observers to confuse the power of representation with the possession of what is represented.

A mathematical model can reproduce the behaviour of a physical process without becoming that process; a financial simulation can anticipate certain transactions without acquiring control over every circumstance influencing them; and a computational system can identify correlations among millions of recorded actions without exhausting the lived experiences from which those records originated. The genuine achievement lies in detecting relationships that survive changes of description, scale or observational position, while recognising that every method reveals some aspects of a phenomenon and conceals others. The most sophisticated observer is consequently not necessarily the one who claims to see everything, but the one who understands why any particular form of seeing remains incomplete. Legrand's success depends upon interpreting evidence rather than commanding it; Neo's exceptional powers depend upon the specific computational rules of the world he inhabits; Jensen's authoritarian confidence begins where his willingness to distinguish interpretation from reality ends. Nor does recognition require isolation from every other human being or rejection of accumulated knowledge. The decipherer inherits language, symbolic conventions and intellectual procedures developed through collective history, even when the act of interpretation occurs within one particular nervous system. Intellectual independence means refusing to surrender judgement, not pretending that judgement originates without cultural experience. Nevertheless, once recurrent relationships become intelligible, another temptation appears: if an observer can identify the organisation of previous events, might it become possible to calculate what will happen next? And if future conduct becomes sufficiently predictable, who acquires the authority to decide which actions should occur? The question carries us from Poe's parchment and Neo's digital vision into the experimental laboratory of B. F. Skinner, where the capacity to anticipate behaviour becomes inseparable from the possibility of deliberately shaping it.

Part II: The Skinner Paradox: The Predictable Future and the Unpredictable Morality of Human Behaviour

“A self is a repertoire of behavior appropriate to a given set of contingencies.”

B. F. Skinner, 1971, Beyond Freedom and Dignity

The extraordinary promise of recognising recurrent relationships is that the future becomes partially intelligible before it occurs. The cryptogram deciphered by William Legrand reveals a message concealed within apparently meaningless marks; Neo's recognition of computational rules allows him to anticipate events within an artificial environment; Arthur Jensen's knowledge of financial relationships permits him to calculate consequences that remain invisible to those participating in the same economic system. But the movement from recognising what has happened to anticipating what may happen introduces a fundamental philosophical danger. Once behaviour becomes predictable, prediction itself can be transformed into an instrument for producing the behaviour it anticipates. Few twentieth-century thinkers explored this possibility more systematically than B. F. Skinner, whose experimental analysis of operant conditioning challenged the inherited assumption that human action must originate from an autonomous interior agent standing apart from its biological and environmental history. For Skinner, conduct emerges through relationships between organisms and their surroundings, shaped by reinforcement, punishment and the accumulated consequences of previous actions. A person does not necessarily repeat an action because an independent metaphysical Self has freely selected it from an unlimited universe of possibilities; the probability of repetition depends partly upon the conditions under which comparable actions previously occurred.

Skinner's Walden Two, published in 1948, imagined a community organised around the deliberate design of such conditions, while his subsequent work transformed behavioural analysis into a controversial philosophy of social organisation. The disturbing implication was not that human beings had suddenly become machines, but that much of what societies describe as autonomous choice could be investigated through observable relationships. Nevertheless, the very success of such investigation reveals a problem that may be formulated as the Skinner Paradox, although it is a critical extension of behaviourism rather than a proposition explicitly advanced by Skinner himself. The ability to anticipate an action does not establish the desirability of the action anticipated, and the capacity to engineer its occurrence does not confer moral authority upon the engineer. A system might reliably produce obedience, conformity, consumption, aggression or apparent happiness without demonstrating that these outcomes constitute a good human life. Nor can their eventual moral interpretation be calculated from present behavioural regularities alone, since moral judgements emerge within changing relationships of cultural expectation, social conflict, historical circumstance and individual experience. Conduct condemned in one historical environment may be celebrated in another; an intervention justified as benevolent may subsequently become an instrument of oppression; and a supposedly irrational refusal may retrospectively appear as the decisive act of resistance. This uncertainty does not make ethical reasoning impossible. It establishes that the description of recurrent behaviour and the justification of its deliberate production are different intellectual operations. Knowledge of what people are likely to do cannot independently establish what they ought to be made to do. The political danger begins when an institution treats the first achievement as sufficient authority for the second. Jensen's imagined financial universe is a social laboratory on an immense scale: once the governing relationships are understood, the population can supposedly be organised according to their demands. Yet a predictable society is not necessarily a desirable one, and the absence of visible resistance may indicate successful conditioning rather than genuine satisfaction.

The confrontation between Skinner and Noam Chomsky transferred this problem into language, the medium through which human beings describe their actions, construct identities and justify authority. In Verbal Behavior (1957), Skinner attempted to analyse linguistic activity through behavioural principles, treating speech as conduct shaped by environmental histories and social consequences. Chomsky's influential 1959 review challenged the explanatory adequacy of this approach, particularly its difficulty accounting for the creative production and comprehension of sentences never previously encountered. Their disagreement became emblematic of a larger intellectual division between explanations emphasising learned relationships and those investigating the internal computational organisation of linguistic competence. Chomsky's subsequent research developed the argument that human language involves specialised structural capacities not adequately explained through imitation, frequency or external reinforcement alone. The rise of Large Language Models has complicated this historical opposition in a way neither participant could have anticipated. Systems trained upon immense quantities of recorded language can generate novel sentences, sustain complicated discussions, translate between languages and reproduce forms of argument without possessing human developmental histories or being supplied with a complete explicit grammar of each language they use. Such achievements demonstrate the remarkable productive capacities of statistical learning, although they do not prove that biological language acquisition follows the same procedures or that Skinner's original theory has been vindicated in its entirety. Contemporary neural architectures are not simply electronic versions of operant conditioning, and the ability to generate fluent discourse does not settle questions about consciousness, embodied understanding or linguistic competence. Their philosophical importance lies instead in the industrial separation of sophisticated verbal performance from the biological speaker once assumed indispensable to its production. Language becomes something that can be statistically reconstructed, personalised and distributed at a scale inaccessible to ordinary human communication. The consequences become more disturbing when the generated words are incorporated into environments designed to modify conduct. Digital platforms already organise visibility, attention and commercial exposure through algorithms informed by recorded behaviour; generative systems extend these capabilities by producing increasingly adaptable messages, recommendations, explanations and synthetic interlocutors.

The technology does not merely observe what an individual reads or desires; it may participate in arranging what the individual subsequently encounters, thereby influencing the conditions under which further preferences develop. Prediction and intervention enter a continuous relationship in which the apparent accuracy of the model may partly reflect the environment constructed around its expectations. This is the modern extension of Jensen's corporate ambition: not simply selling products to people, but organising the informational circumstances through which people become increasingly receptive to what institutions intend to sell. Yet the machine cannot establish the moral legitimacy of those intentions merely by predicting their success. Even highly accurate forecasts remain conditional upon the relationships from which they were inferred, while changing those relationships can alter the outcomes themselves. The distinction is therefore not between an unknowable future and an absolutely calculable one, but between the provisional recognition of tendencies and the authoritarian conviction that their continuation ought to be enforced. Artificial intelligence may substantially enlarge the first capacity while making the second temptation more dangerous. The most consequential question is no longer whether a machine can generate convincing language or anticipate certain actions, but whether its fluency and predictive usefulness will permit institutions to manufacture the explanations through which their control appears natural, beneficial and inevitable. To confront that possibility requires something more immediate than another theory of linguistic competence. It requires an ability to recognise when apparently respectable language has ceased to explain reality and begun to conceal the interests of those producing it. That is where George Carlin enters the philosophical argument.