Abstract Thursday: "Pattern"

My mind wandered into a mathematical/philosophical/semantic maze when I started to prepare today’s blip. Ingeborg has chosen “pattern” as the theme for today’s Abstract Thursday challenge. Seeing what I regarded as a random pattern of raindrops on the window, with random patches of brightness showing through the trees behind it, I thought that could make a suitable blip. But then I Googled a definition of the word “Pattern” and found that it should be a “regularly repeating arrangement”. Oh dear!

I then Googled some more and found that it’s much more complicated than that. As an example, the pattern of stars in the sky seems pretty random – but over many centuries humans have identified patterns in them, and interestingly not always the same patterns: the British see “The Plough” constellation whereas Americans see “The Big Dipper”. So maybe patterns are, to some extent, "in the eye of the beholder".

(NB: Please feel free to stop reading here if you wish, if you think this is getting too silly!)

Then I Googled “Is there such a thing as a random pattern?” and found an answer which I rather liked, from someone called Adarsh Raju on Quora Digest:

“A random pattern is an oxymoron.
The definition of random is ‘not following any known patterns’.
However, once we are able to find a pattern in any perceived randomness, it is no longer considered as random.
Since we are generally unaware of the precise patterns of all the physical and biological processes that are involved for our conscious mind to generate a “random” thought, our random thoughts are not following any known patterns and hence there is such a thing as a random pattern - by it’s definition.
Whether anything can be truly random (not just us unable to find a pattern) is debatable because all random things in existence are only perceived random while still being subjected to the laws of the universe, which are not random.”

In the end, I decided to stick with the “random patterns” which I’d photographed, but I covered both bases by duplicating it into a regularly repeating arrangement. Phew – blip done!