Brains and patterns

Of course the brain matters! What would we be without its exquisite, sometimes agonising, sensitivity to the subtly rippling, ripping rhythms of significance that pass through us (that is, if we are lucky)? But no amount of prodable fleshiness makes the brain ontologically prior to that for which it is the sense organ: patterns. It is what it is because there are patterns—that is to say, repetitions, reproductions. And yet there was a day, some time ago, when patterns were, for the first time, sensed. And this was an event in the history of patterns.