36 3 A Patternist Philosophy of Mind system for recognizing patterns in itself and the world, critically including patterns regarding which procedures are likely to lead to the achievement of which goals in which contexts. Pattern as the basis of mind is not in itself is a very novel idea; this concept is present, for instance, in the 19th-century philosophy of Charles Peirce [Pei34], in the writings of contempo- rary philosophers Daniel Dennett [Den91] and Douglas Hofstadter [Hof79, Hof96], in Benjamin Whorf’s [Who64] linguistic philosophy and Gregory Bateson’s [Bat79| systems theory of mind and nature. Bateson spoke of the Metapattern: “that it is pattern which connects.” In Goertzel’s writings on philosophy of mind, an effort has been made to pursue this theme more thoroughly than has been done before, and to articulate in detail how various aspects of human mind and mind in general can be well-understood by explicitly adopting a patternist perspective. ! In the patternist perspective, "pattern" is generally defined as "representation as something simpler." Thus, for example, if one measures simplicity in terms of bit-count, then a program compressing an image would be a pattern in that image. But if one uses a simplicity measure incorporating run-time as well as bit-count, then the compressed version may or may not be a pattern in the image, depending on how one’s simplicity measure weights the two factors. This definition encompasses simple repeated patterns, but also much more complex ones. While pattern theory has typically been elaborated in the context of computational theory, it is not intrinsically tied to computation; rather, it can be developed in any context where there is a notion of "representation" or "production" and a way of measuring simplicity. One just needs to be able to assess the extent to which f represents or produces X, and then to compare the simplicity of f and X; and then one can assess whether f is a pattern in X. A formalization of