lundi 24 janvier 2011

Dennett's ill-formed concept of pattern

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I'm reading Dennett's "Real Patterns" – and I can't really get over one rather important problem.

Dennett's whole point is that intentional attitudes are real because there are patterns which act like affordances in our behaviour for an intentional interpretation. I could follow him there if patterns were affordances, but they're not. In order to express what they are, he uses Chatlin's definition of mathematical randomness:

“A series of numbers is random if the smallest algorithm capable of specifying it to a computer has about the same number of bits of information as the series itself” (Chaitlin, p. 48 via Dennett, p.32)

which he interprets:

“A series (of dots or numbers or whatever) is random if and only if the information required to describe (transmit) the series accurately is incomprehensible: nothing shorter than the verbatim bit map will preserve the series. Then a series is not random—has a pattern—if and only if there is some more efficient way of describing it.” (Dennett, p.32)

You'll notice that in the interpretation, "computer" has been removed. It is, however, huge.

Say you have a very basic computer plugged to a simple screen, on which you are trying to print barcodes (this isn't unlike Dennett's example). Say there's a bug in the main board that causes the pixels in the second horizontal line to be written from right to left instead of the opposite. It might take you more code, but you could still print any barcode you need.

Now, say you're main board is really messed up: pixels are so scattered that if you enter a program which writes a regular barcode, you get a random pattern (in Chaitlin's sense). Inversely, because of this malfunction, in order to actually print this barcode, you need to specify every bit one by one. Then the pattern that is most regular to us and to a standard computer can't be output by nothing short of a "verbatim bit map", while the pattern that is random to our eyes and to a standard computer's can be output by an algorithm that is much shorter than the bit map itself.

Dennett's mistake is that "computer" is anything to him. He forgets that a computer is corporeal object, and, as such, has perception bias. The only way to salvage his theory is to consider patterns as affordances.

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