I just wonder if the fractal is the best possible analogy for the new forms of learning, especially Mandelbrot. It seems to repeat itself endlessly. Where are the gualitative changes. Maybe we need a new fractal form for a analogy. Or something else. Is this prosess to be analogizised.
In my point of view Madelbrot is a prototype on a serial learning. I can not see there unic new forms. Complexcity is not encreasing. Am I wrong?

An other analogy would be Darwinian in formal sense. In the long run there will be qualitative changes, mutations. Third analogy in societal sense would the concept of the critical mass. It is borrowed from physics. After a certain guantitative point the gualitative changes will emerge.

MacLuhan is allways a good choise in postmodern^5 times also.

Regards
JM

Self-similarity doesn’t always mean exactly similar as the whole, but rather it can also been seen as an approximation. For example clouds or coastlines may be statistically self-similar, but not exactly in the details, but almost. Still, there seems to be a recursive loop working its way forward.

Pattern recognition usually involves one to recognize something that is familiar from earlier experience. I see pattern recognition to be more about remixing than recognizing totally new alien forms. Earlier experiences combined to new patterns emerging is a fractal to my mind.

My hologram analogy is just an analogy: it’s rough but it helps to see parts of what I think. To my mind, knowledge is not in the nodes and it’s not in the network either. It’s somewhere in between, like in a hologram. It depends of what point of view you take for examining it. If we take temporality into account, things like knowledge get even harder to examine. The paint looks different at every act of painting.

Concerning fractals, self-similarity is in conflict with “new patterns”.

Teemu:
“Knowledge is like a hologram. In holograms, even smaller pieces of it include the picture of the whole object. ”

That is not true for knowledge.