“The central defect of the human mind,” Custine said, “is its unfortunate habit of seeing patterns where none exist. Of course, that is also its chief asset.”

— Alastair Reynolds , book Century Rain

“But sometimes a very dangerous one.”
Source: Century Rain (2004), Chapter 12 (p. 178)

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Alastair Reynolds 198

British novelist and astronomer 1966

Titon Rahmawan

“Every civilization sees itself as the center of the world and writes its history as the central drama of human history.”

Samuel P. Huntington (1927–2008) American political scientist

Source: The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order

“We can’t run this experiment a thousand times to see the range of different outcomes. We can only run it once. The human mind has trouble with situations like that. We see patterns where they don’t exist, we find meaning in randomness.”

Neal Stephenson book Seveneves

“YMIR” (pp. 423-424)
Seveneves (2015), Part Two

“Of course, the drug does not produce the transcendent experience. It merely acts as a chemical key — it opens the mind, frees the nervous system of its ordinary patterns and structures.”

Timothy Leary (1920–1996) American psychologist

The Psychedelic Experience (1995)
Context: A psychedelic experience is a journey to new realms of consciousness. The scope and content of the experience is limitless, but its characteristic features are the transcendence of verbal concepts, of space-time dimensions, and of the ego or identity. Such experiences of enlarged consciousness can occur in a variety of ways: sensory deprivation, yoga exercises, disciplined meditation, religious or aesthetic ecstasies, or spontaneously. Most recently they have become available to anyone through the ingestion of psychedelic drugs such as LSD, psilocybin, mescaline, DMT, etc. Of course, the drug does not produce the transcendent experience. It merely acts as a chemical key — it opens the mind, frees the nervous system of its ordinary patterns and structures.

“No government is perfect. One of the chief virtues of a democracy, however, is that its defects are always visible and under democratic processes can be pointed out and corrected.”

Harry Truman (1884–1972) American politician, 33rd president of the United States (in office from 1945 to 1953)

Speech to a joint session of the US Congress (12 March 1947), outlining what became known as The Truman Doctrine

“Superstition lives longer than books, it is engraved on the human mind 'til it becomes a part of its existence.”

John Clare (1793–1864) English poet

Popularity of Authorship (1824)

“It is commonly said that a pattern, however it is written, has four essential parts: a statement of the context where the pattern is useful, the problem that the pattern addresses, the forces that play in forming a solution, and the solution that resolves those forces. … it supports the definition of a pattern as "a solution to a problem in a context", a definition that [unfortunately] fixes the bounds of the pattern to a single problem-solution pair”

Martin Fowler (1963) British programmer

Source: Analysis Patterns: Reusable Object Models, 1997, p. 6

“There is no doubt that right-hemisphere intuitive thinking may perceive patterns and connections too difficult for the left hemisphere; but it may also detect patterns where none exist. Skeptical and critical thinking is not a hallmark of the right hemisphere. And unalloyed right-hemisphere doctrines, particularly when they are invented during new and trying circumstances, may be erroneous or paranoid.”

Carl Sagan (1934–1996) American astrophysicist, cosmologist, author and science educator

Source: The Dragons of Eden (1977), Chapter 7, “Lovers and Madmen” (p. 189)

“It is a shameful sign of our arrogance that our history departments have almost no Chinese history in them, our literature courses almost no Chinese literature, our philosophy departments almost none of the great Chinese systems of philosophy. And our religious schools have been the most arrogant of all.
This ignorant arrogant mind has become fixed in its patterns. It is the pattern which considers anything not American to be inferior — unless it be English.”

Pearl S. Buck (1892–1973) American writer

"China and the Federal Union" an address at the Federal Union organization, New York City (April 1942) http://www.english.upenn.edu/Projects/Buck/excerpt-fu.html

“The chief good is the suspension of the judgment, which tranquillity of mind follows like its shadow.”

Diogenes Laërtius (180–240) biographer of ancient Greek philosophers

Pyrrho, 11.
The Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers (c. 200 A.D.), Book 9: Uncategorized philosophers and Skeptics

“The central defect of the human mind,” Custine said, “is its unfortunate habit of seeing patterns where none exist. Of course, that is also its chief asset.”

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