topics: |  philosophy | science | emergence

Dennett: Real Patterns 189

Are there really beliefs? Or are we learning (from neuroscience and
psychology, presumably) that, strictly speaking, beliefs are figments of our
imagination, items in a superseded ontology?

Are centers of gravity in your ontology?
[argument / thought expt from "Intentional Stance"]

philosophers feel when it comes to beliefs (and other mental items) one
must be either a realist or an eliminative materialist.

... my analogizing beliefs to centers of gravity has been attacked from both
sides of the ontological dichotomy, by philosophers who think it is simply
obvious that centers of gravity are useful fictions, and by philosophers who
think it is simply obvious that centers of gravity are perfectly real:

    The trouble with these supposed parallels . . . is that they are all
    strictly speaking false, although they are no doubt useful
    simplifications for many purposes. It is false, for example, that the
    gravitational attraction between the Earth and the Moon involves two
    point masses; but it is a good enough first approximation for many
    calculations. However, this is not at all what Dennett really wants to
    say about intentional states. For he insists that to adopt the
    intentional stance and interpret an agent as acting on certain beliefs
    and desires is to discern a pattern in his actions which is genuinely
    there (a pattern which is missed if we instead adopt a scientific
    stance): Dennett certainly does not hold that the role of intentional
    ascriptions is merely to give us a useful approximation to a truth that
    can be more accurately expressed in non-intentional terms.3

Compare this with Fred Dretske’s4 equally confident assertion of realism:

    I am a realist about centers of gravity. . . . The earth obviously exerts
    a gravitational attraction on all parts of the moon—not just its center
    of gravity. The resultant force, a vector sum, acts through a point, but
    this is something quite different. One should be very clear about what
    centers of gravity are before deciding whether to be literal about them,
    before deciding whether or not to be a center-of-gravity realist. (ibid.,
    p. 511)

trivial abstract object: Dennett’s lost sock center: the point defined as the
center of the smallest sphere that can be inscribed around all the socks I
have ever lost in my life.

[has] the same metaphysical status as centers of gravity.
centers of gravity are real because they are (somehow) good abstract objects.

I have claimed that beliefs are best considered to be abstract objects rather
like centers of gravity.

Dennett's position: a mild and intermediate sort of realism is a positively
attractive position,

 

               patterns A to F.  Are they different or same?  

Dennett reveals that pattern A to F were Generated by having a program write
ten lines, each w ten dots then ten blanks, with noise: A to F: 25% 10% 25%
1% 33% 50%.

Chaitin's definition of randomness as incompressibility. 

How many bits do we need to transmit the image?  
a. all 900 bits - needed for F
b. "ten square patterns", except for dots at 55, 73, etc. - may be smaller
   for patterns with greater "regularity" - B, D etc. 

Any shorter description is a description of a real pattern in the data. 

Contents

    Preface ix
    Acknowledgments xi
    Sources xiii
    Introduction 1

I Philosophical Perspectives on Emergence 7

    Introduction to Philosophical Perspectives on Emergence
  1 The Rise and Fall of British Emergentism 19
    Brian P. McLaughlin
  2 On the Idea of Emergence 61
    Carl Hempel and Paul Oppenheim
  3 Reductionism and the Irreducibility of Consciousness 69
    John Searle
  4 Emergence and Supervenience 81
    Brian P. McLaughlin
  5 Aggregativity: Reductive Heuristics for Finding Emergence 99
    William C. Wimsatt
  6 How Properties Emerge 111
    Paul Humphreys
  7 Making Sense of Emergence 127
    Jaegwon Kim
  8 Downward Causation and Autonomy in Weak Emergence 155
    Mark A. Bedau
  9 Real Patterns 189
    Daniel C. Dennett

II Scientific Perspectives on Emergence 207

Introduction to Scientific Perspectives on Emergence
 10 More Is Different: Broken Symmetry and the Nature of the Hierarchical Structure
 	of Science 221
    P. W. Anderson
  11 Emergence 231
     Andrew Assad and Norman H. Packard
  12 Sorting and Mixing: Race and Sex 235
     Thomas Schelling
  13 Alternative Views of Complexity 249
     Herbert Simon
  14 The Theory of Everything 259
     Robert B. Laughlin and David Pines
  15 Is Anything Ever New? Considering Emergence 269
     James P. Crutchfield
  16 Design, Observation, Surprise! A Test of Emergence 287
     Edmund M. A. Ronald, Moshe Sipper, and Mathieu S. Capcarre`re
  17 Ansatz for Dynamical Hierarchies 305
     Steen Rasmussen, Nils A. Baas, Bernd Mayer, and Martin Nillson

III Background and Polemics 335

     Introduction to Background and Polemics
  18 Newtonianism, Reductionism, and the Art of Congressional Testimony 345
     Stephen Weinberg
  19 Issues in the Logic of Reductive Explanations 359
     Ernest Nagel
  20 Chaos 375
     James P. Crutchfield, J. Doyne Farmer, Norman H. Packard, and Robert S. Shaw
  21 Undecidability and Intractability in Theoretical Physics 387
     Stephen Wolfram
  22 Special Sciences (Or: The Disunity of Science as a Working Hypothesis) 395
     Jerry Fodor
  23 Supervenience 411
     David Chalmers
  24 The Nonreductivist’s Troubles with Mental Causation 427
     Jaegwon Kim