Pattern Over Stuff

Lyrics#

[Verse 1]
When I wake up in the morning
There isn’t a “me” all at once
There’s just some awareness
Floating in an ill-defined space

Then sensations gather
Images form
A thought appears —
“Where am I?”
“What time is it?”

And a little later
The whole psychosocial self
Boots back online

[Pre-Chorus]
You can say it’s just the brain
Shifting states in a body in a room
Or you can say
Reality is crystallizing
Out of something like nothing

I don’t feel the need to choose

[Chorus]
Maybe pattern is more basic than stuff
Maybe the world is habits of perception
Regularities we agreed to trust
Not a solid stage beneath everything

We build physics from patterns
Then treat the patterns like stone
But what if “stone” is just
The most stable story we’ve told?

[Verse 2]
Science is beautiful
I spend my life inside it
But I don’t feel
That particles are the final ground

The data we call “reality”
Is a web of relations
A history of observations
Condensed into law

You can do engineering
Without assuming
There’s an absolute thing
Behind the equations

[Pre-Chorus]
First there is raw experience
Then reaction
Then relationship —
And pattern lives in relationship

Maybe “objective matter”
Is just one very successful pattern
In the mind

[Chorus]
Maybe pattern is more basic than stuff
Maybe we are relations in motion
Minds are knots in a larger weave
Temporarily calling themselves “me”

We rise like structure in noise
Convincing ourselves we’re solid
But under the form and the name
It’s process, all the way down

[Bridge]
I don’t need one clean story
I can hold contradictions
The engineer and the mystic
Sharing the same skull

If there are things we don’t understand
Psi, mind, strange phenomena
Maybe it’s new physics
Or physics that’s wider than we thought

If there’s a probability you can write
If there’s a model you can build
Why say “not physics”?
Why draw the border there?

[Final Chorus]
Maybe pattern is more basic than stuff
Maybe the self is a recurring wave
In a field that doesn’t belong
To space and time alone

We crystallize, we dissolve
Stories the field tells locally
And when the noise of the person gets quiet
What’s left feels strangely kind

Not proven
Not a theorem
Just what remains
When the mind is still

Composer Notes#

The lyrics are not exactly mine. I listened to The Jim Rutt Show EP 330 — Ben Goertzel on worldview — published January 22, 2026. I wrote the song two days later. I versified the conversation.

Jim Rutt opens the interview like this: “Somebody named Ben Goertzel woke up. What is this Ben Goertzel? What universe did he wake up in?” — and Goertzel answers with consciousness crystallizing out of ambient awareness in an ill-defined space. The first verse is that answer. So is the pre-chorus: Goertzel says you can interpret waking up as “a body lying in a room and its brain is shifting from one state to another” — or as “the great cosmic nothing, and then reality is crystallizing” — and closes: “I don’t feel need to choose among them.” At some point Jim summarizes: “maybe pattern is more fundamental than stuff?” — and Goertzel confirms. That is the title. It is also Events All the Way Down in one phrase. The song follows the interview in sequence.

The second pre-chorus comes from Peirce. Goertzel cites him directly: “there’s first which is pure unanalyzed qualia, then there’s second which is reaction, then there’s third which is relationship, and pattern is in what he would have called the domain of third.” The lines “First there is raw experience / Then reaction / Then relationship” are that sequence. “Maybe ‘objective matter’ is just one very successful pattern in the mind” comes from the next sentence: for Peirce, absolute physical reality would be “just one pattern that popped up in people’s minds that they happen to like.”

The bridge comes from two moments. The first: Goertzel describes himself — “I’m comfortable holding both those perspectives in the chaos of my mind at one time without needing to kill one or decide one or the other” — and quotes Whitman: “I contradict myself very well then. I’m large. I contain multitudes.” The second: the discussion of parapsychology and uryphysics — “Why is this not physics? If there’s some probability statement I could make, why does physics have to be the four-dimensional space-time continuum?” The final chorus comes from the closing. Jim asks whether Goertzel believes consciousness is fundamentally good. The answer: “things then crystallize out of this […] eventually, they’ll dissolve back into the zero point energy field of joy, love, and compassion. And this is utterly nonscientific, just personal intuitive or spiritual feeling.” “We crystallize, we dissolve,” “what’s left feels strangely kind,” “not proven / not a theorem / just what remains / when the mind is still” — those are those phrases.

Suno understood what I wanted here better than in any other track: minimalist art rock, voice almost spoken, the music building gradually as the claims grow larger. “It’s process, all the way down” — the model placed that line exactly where it needed to be, at the point where the harmonic build also peaks. I don’t know if that was intention or coincidence of the synthesis process. Whitehead would probably say the distinction doesn’t matter as much as we think.

Years of trying to write that in prose. The song was faster.