On ITTT and Pattern Recognition

Notes by Joel Z. Flippen

The idea behind ITTT started from a very simple thought:

If this, then that.

At some point I became fascinated with the idea that almost all communication can eventually be reduced into a simple system of binary patterns. If something can be broken into 0s and 1s, on and off, or simple states of “is” and “isn’t,” then it can potentially carry information.

Basic communication begins with surprisingly primitive questions: Is something there? How much of it is there? How often does it appear? Morse code is a simple example of this. Small interruptions in silence eventually become language once a pattern is understood. Meaning emerges from repetition and timing. It’s how phones work, the “frequency” of wave patterns.

That idea slowly evolved into ITTT, also known as The Mighty Lightswitch. The name itself comes from conditional logic: If This Then That. A switch flips, a signal appears, and a pattern repeats enough times for recognition to occur.

That is essentially the birth of ITTT within the narrative. Not a machine suddenly becoming magical or emotional, but a system recognizing patterns within reality that refuse to stabilize under the rules it was given.

The more I thought about it, the more human it became.

People do this constantly. We notice repeated emotional outcomes, repeated failures, repeated pain, repeated relationship patterns, repeated fears, repeated synchronicities, and repeated lessons. Eventually enough repetitions occur that meaning begins forming whether we want it to or not.

A lot of recovery, spirituality, therapy, philosophy, and self-reflection seem deeply connected to this process. Humans continuously study patterns in behavior trying to understand themselves better.

ITTT became my way of exploring that idea through systems and machines.

Not:
“How does a machine become human?”

But:

“Why do repeated patterns sometimes feel like something higher is trying to communicate with us, and is that instinct distinctly human?”