To celebrate the importance of patterns, The Imaginary Foundation released the Pattern Seekers Trading Cards, each one highlighting a unique “patternist” who has made a profound impact on the world by discovering a “metapattern”. Upon reading about these guys, you’ll see the “meta-pattern” that defined their life and thinking.
We selected those names from the above project, which more closely fit the concerns of the P2P Foundation. (note this list absolutely requires adding more female contributors)
For the whole list, presented by Jason Silva, go here.
1. Buckminster Fuller
Meta Pattern: Nature is a totally efficient, self-regenerating system. IF we discover the laws that govern this system and live synergistically within them, sustainability will follow and humankind will be a success.
2. Marshall Mcluhan
Meta Pattern: The medium is the message. Developments in communications technology change the way we think about and experience the world. We shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us. Electronic communications are an extension of the human nervous system.
3. Joseph Campbell
Meta Pattern: All religions are metaphorical rather than literal and contain poetic, symbolic meaning that should be examined for clues concerning the fundamental truths of the world and our existence. The Monomyth: All great stories fit the archetype of the “hero’s journey” whereby the hero answers the call to adventure, leaves the familiar world behind, overcomes great obstacles, faces his own actual or symbolic death, transcends and has an apotheosis, gains glory and insight, brings back the gift of wisdom back to the ordinary world in the return.
6. George Lakoff
Meta Pattern: The mind is embodied. Truth is a metaphorical construction, not an attribute of objective reality. Reason proceeds from our experience of physicality.
10. James Lovelock
Meta Pattern: The Gaia hypothesis. Lovelock proposed that Earth is a living, self-regulating system that functions as a superorganism. His hypothesis has been hugely influential in the development of ecology and environmentalism.
15. Robert Wright
Meta Pattern: Biological and cultural evolution reward cooperation. In a globally networked society, the welfare of others is in our own self-interest. Borrowing from game theory, Wright calls this the “non-zero sum.”
17. Peter Russell
Meta Pattern: The Internet is the central nervous system, and each user a discrete neuron, of a newly evolved global brain.
22. Thomas Kuhn
Meta Pattern: Science proceeds by revolution. Kuhn coined the term paradigm shift to mark the point at which accumulated data overturns received wisdom, engendering a radical transformation of the world and how we think about it.
24. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
Meta Pattern: Biological evolution is Anti-Entropic: instead of simplifying , evolution is a force of complexification which has crossed a threshold at the dawn of man, at which point we have switched to technological evolution. Evolution has become “self-aware” and “Self-directed” and birthed a new substrate of “mind” he coined “The Noosphere”, which sits above the biosphere, combining all of human knowledge and intelligence and leading us to an “omega point of infinity in all directions” (his own take on the Singularity).