Patterns. If general principles actually exist, then patterns are the most general principle of all. Because everything is a pattern. Every. Single. Thing. Musical notes, mathematical equations, DNA sequences, even human language. Nothing but patterns of sound, patterns of numbers, patterns of molecules, and patterns of words. All a pattern is is the regular occurance of something. See the same thing happen over and over again, and it’s a pattern. And our world is a world of regularity; it’s a world of patterns.

It’s not hard to see this. Throw a ball into the air 30 times, and you’ll see a pattern: every time, it comes back down. Put a pot of water on a hot stove, and the water will heat up and boil away. Every time. The earth has a particular pattern of movement, where it rotates as it goes around the sun. The sun emits a particular pattern of electromagnetic radiation. Patterns are everywhere.

You might be tempted to say “obviously those things will happen, they’re just obeying the laws of physics”. But this is precisely backwards. The laws of physics don’t cause anything to happen any more than your birth certificate causes you to exist. Physical laws are nothing but compact representations of the patterns, the regularity we see in the world. Newton’s laws of motion simply describe the regular behavior of moving objects. Electricity isn’t bound to adhere to Maxwell’s equations; they’re just a description of the regular behavior of electricity.

Patterns don’t follow physical laws: physical laws merely describe patterns.

So everything is a pattern then. And that’s pretty important. Because patterns are what allow the universe as we know it to exist. We might be able imagine a universe which operates under different laws of physics. But it’s impossible to contemplate any sort of existence that has no regularity, that’s completely random. Imagine a universe with NO laws of physics, NO fundamental particles. Not even basic concepts like ‘time’ and ’space’. It’s incomprehensible. Existence is defined by regularity. It’s defined by patterns.

Consider the human brain, possibly the most complex entity in existence. Billions and billions of neurons, woven together in fantasticly detailed webs of biological circuitry. And it exists for the sole purpose of recognizing patterns. Our brains are nothing but pattern processing engines. This is literally the entirety of their function.

Your brain is a big computer that matches patterns of input, such as sight and sound, to patterns of output, such as muscle movements and speech. It takes in sensory data from your various sense organs (skin, eyes, mouth, etc.) It sifts through all that data, looking for patterns. When it finds them (and it always does), it spits out a behavior that corresponds to that pattern.

Say you touch a hot stove. The sense neurons in your hand become extremely stimulated because of the heat, and they send this data to your brain. Your brain immediately matches this pattern of sensory information to its own internal pattern of ‘extreme heat = pain = bad’, and immediately sends the action to your hand to pull away, before you’ve even had time to think about it.

Data in –> Process to find patterns –> Match the pattern to an action. This three step process describes EVERYTHING that goes on in your brain. IQ tests, designed to measure your entire cognitive function, do nothing but test your ability to find patterns. See here . Because pattern recognition is what we do. So much so, in fact, that we’ll desperately try to find them even when no pattern exists.

From The Frontal Cortex :

“Look, for example, at this elegant little experiment. A rat was put in a T-shaped maze with a few morsels of food placed on either the far right or left side of the enclosure. The placement of the food is randomly determined, but the dice is rigged: over the long run, the food was placed on the left side sixty per cent of the time. How did the rat respond? It quickly realized that the left side was more rewarding. As a result, it always went to the left, which resulted in a sixty percent success rate…
…The experiment was then repeated with Yale undergraduates. Unlike the rat, their swollen brains stubbornly searched for the elusive pattern that determined the placement of the reward. They made predictions and then tried to learn from their prediction errors. The problem was that there was nothing to predict: the randomness was real. Because the students refused to settle for a 60 percent success rate, they ended up with a 52 percent success rate. Although most of the students were convinced they were making progress towards identifying the underlying algorithm, they were actually being outsmarted by a rat.”

That says a lot about us, and a lot about the world. Because of the shear ubiquity of patterns, we never needed to evolve the ability to process randomness. We’re constantly trying to find the pattern in whatever we look at.

But that’s good! The sole reason for our position at the top of the food chain is pattern recognition, the brains amazing ability to find and learn from regularities. The entire universe is nothing but patterns of patterns of patterns. Think of the hierarchy of existence. Regular arrangements of quarks make protons and neutrons. Regular arrangements of protons and neutrons, make the various chemical elements, and so on. It’s all one giant series of nested patterns.

You won’t find a more general principle than that.