I Hoped I Was Wrong

I wasn't just thinking about it anymore. I was presenting it. I even won a government award for it. Pattern recognition explains intelligence. I believed it completely.

Around the same time, I was reading Carl Sagan's Cosmos.

Sagan tells the story of how science kept making us smaller. Copernicus showed Earth isn't the center of anything. Darwin showed we're just another animal. Hubble showed our galaxy is one of billions, floating in emptiness so large it makes everything we've ever known invisible.

Every few centuries, we find out we're less special than we thought.

From Sagan I ended up reading Richard Dawkins. Dawkins is a biologist who wrote The God Delusion and became one of the most famous atheists in the world. His argument is blunt: there is no God. No designer. No one behind the curtain. Everything from bacteria to galaxies, explained by natural processes. No creator required.

That hit different when I combined it with my own theory.

If Dawkins is right, and there's no creator, and even the laws of physics and math are just patterns... then what made the patterns?

Did something put them there? Something we can't see or measure? Or is there truly nothing behind it all, and patterns just exist on their own?

I didn't have an answer. I still don't. But sitting with that question changed what I was looking for. I stopped trying to prove that intelligence is pattern recognition. I started asking something harder: what causes a pattern to exist?

That's when I found Judea Pearl, one of the founders of modern AI. He'd spent his career on exactly this. And he had a way of making the problem impossible to ignore.

Here's how he put it. Imagine you've watched every sunrise for 30 years. You can predict exactly when the sun will come up tomorrow, down to the minute. Pattern recognition at its finest.

But do you understand why the sun rises?

Pearl's answer was uncomfortable: pattern recognition captures correlations. This tends to follow that. But it misses causes entirely. You can watch a million sunrises and never figure out that the Earth rotates.

Real intelligence, he argued, needs a model of how the world actually works. Not just what tends to happen next.

I sat with that. Because Pearl wasn't describing a general problem. He was describing me.

I'd noticed the same thing happening across law, language, lifting, math. I'd called it a theory. But had I understood anything? Or had I just spotted a correlation across my own experiences and called it an answer?

OK. So maybe pattern recognition isn't the whole story. It explains most of intelligence, but not all. I could live with that.

Then I kept reading.

Daniel Kahneman had spent decades studying how people think, and he'd found something I couldn't explain away. Some thinking is instant: you see a face and know it's angry before you can say why. Obviously pattern recognition. But other thinking is slow. Grinding. You force yourself through a logic puzzle step by step, checking each move, resisting the urge to skip ahead.

I thought about the books I'd started picking up around that time. Nietzsche. Sartre. The big questions: does anything have meaning? Is free will real? Those weren't things you could feel your way through. I'd spend hours on a single page, rereading, trying to hold the argument in my head while questioning every assumption. No gut feeling. No pattern to fall back on. Just slow, painful reasoning.

That was harder to brush off.

Karl Friston pushed it further. Your brain isn't sitting around waiting for patterns, he argued. It's constantly guessing. When someone says "Happy Birth" your brain has already finished "day to you" before the sound hits your ears. Not a pattern matcher. A prediction engine.

Three serious people. Three different angles. All saying the same thing: you're oversimplifying.

I couldn't find a hole in any of it.

Pearl's challenge kept circling back. To even see an apple, you need to already know what an "object" is. What "space" is. What "separate from background" means. Nobody teaches a baby these things. They arrive knowing.

Immanuel Kant made this argument over two centuries ago. He called it a priori knowledge: concepts that exist before experience. Not learned. Not earned through practice. Just there from the start. Built in.

If that's true, then pattern recognition can't be the bottom floor. Something else is underneath it. Something that pattern recognition needs in order to even get started.

I went back and forth on this for weeks. Not in any dramatic way. Just the thought surfacing at odd moments. Showering. Lying in bed not sleeping. Walking to the convenience store at 2 AM because I couldn't stop thinking. The same question, over and over: is there a floor beneath the floor?

Then one night, it flipped.

What if Kant was right that the knowledge is there before experience, but wrong about where it comes from?

What if those concepts aren't pre-installed by some mysterious force? What if they're pattern recognition too, just not mine?

Think about what came before you. Not your parents. Go further back. Millions of years of organisms, living and dying, every single day.

They encountered space every day. Time every day. Solid objects every day. The organisms that couldn't tell a rock from the ground didn't survive long enough to have children. The ones that could, passed on brains slightly better at grasping what "space" means, what "object" means, what "separate from background" means.

Now do that for a few million generations.

Eventually those patterns don't need to be learned anymore. They've been repeated so many times, across so many lifetimes, that they stop being software and become hardware. Your brain doesn't need to learn what "object" means because a hundred million generations already learned it for you.

That's what Kant was seeing. He was right that the knowledge comes before experience. But it's not magic. It's not a mystery. It's pattern recognition that happened before you were born.

They look innate. They feel innate. But they're patterns all the way down. Just very, very old ones.

I didn't arrive here through textbooks or TED talks. I arrived here through immigration files I couldn't explain, English that came out before I could think, and a barbell my body knew how to lift without being taught. The reading came later. The experts sharpened some edges, challenged others. But the experiences kept pointing the same way.

I could be wrong. But I don't think I am.

Intelligence is patterns. All the way down. From the first organism that flinched at a shadow to the machine that taught itself Go.

I believe that now. But I still think about the kid at his desk at 2 AM. If intelligence is all patterns, why did it come so easy to some kids and not to me?

The answer isn't about who sees patterns. Everything alive sees patterns. It's about how deep you go.

And what pulls you deeper.