The mind needs static concepts, otherwise everything would be a blurr of white out. Sort of like a movie consists of a sequence of static frames, otherwise it would just be blurry light.
The problem is when mathematicians distill processes down to stable patterns and think they have found that platonic essence, but all they really found were some stable forms. Sort of like boiling a body down to the skeleton and assuming you have found the seed and soil from which it sprang.
Epicycles, as a modeling of our view of the cosmos, were brilliant math, but lousy physics, because they thought they could just add some such concept to fill the gaps. We still have a cosomology that can’t be falsified, because every time they find a gap between prediction and observation, they just add some enormous new force of nature. What if accountants could just write in a figure, everytime they found a gap and called it “dark money?”
One of the silliest examples of modeling process as patterns is treating time as a dimension, because as mobile organisms, we experience it as a sequence of events and so think of it as the present moving past to future.
The reality is that change turns future to past. Tomorrow becomes yesterday, because the earth turns.
There is no ‘dimension’ of time, because the past is consumed by the present, in order to inform it, aka, causality and conservation of energy.
Different clocks run at different rates simply because they are separate actions. Think metabolism, or frequencies.
That much of human history and psychology is getting everyone reading the same script, following the same narrative, dancing to the same tune, speaking the same language, etc, might create the sense of a universal time, but there is rabbit time, turtle time, tree time, etc.
Unfortunately when everyone is following the same path, it becomes a race and everyone is on rabbit time. Though the turtle is still plodding along, long after all the rabbits have died.
Time is an effect, like temperature, pressure, color, etc. We could use ideal gas laws to correlate volume with temperature and pressure, but they are only foundational to our emotions, bodily functions and environment, rather than the sequence of thought, so we can be more objective about them.
Process goes past to future, while patterns go future to past.
Consciousness goes past to future, while thoughts go future to past.
Lives go birth to death, while life goes onto the next generation, shedding the old.
Products go start to finish, while the production line goes the other way, consuming material and expelling product.
The feedback being the patterns define and direct the process.
The map is never a completely accurate description of the territory, as the map is static, while the territory is dynamic.
