{"id":203971,"date":"2025-01-17T21:04:47","date_gmt":"2025-01-18T03:04:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/01\/dan-dennett-on-patterns-and-ontology"},"modified":"2025-01-17T21:04:47","modified_gmt":"2025-01-18T03:04:47","slug":"dan-dennett-on-patterns-and-ontology","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/01\/dan-dennett-on-patterns-and-ontology","title":{"rendered":"Dan Dennett on Patterns (and Ontology)"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/dan-dennett-on-patterns-and-ontology2.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Dan dennett on <i>pattern<\/i>s and ontology.<\/p>\n<hr>\n<p>I want to look at what Dennett has to say about <i>pattern<\/i>s because 1) I introduced the term in my previous discussion, In Search of Dennett\u2019s Free-Floating Rationales [1], and 2) it is interesting for what it says about his philosophy generally.<\/p>\n<p>You\u2019ll recall that, in that earlier discussion, I pointed out talk of \u201cfree-floating rationales\u201d (FFRs) was authorized by the presence of a certain state of affairs, a certain <i>pattern<\/i> of relationships among, in Dennett\u2019s particular example, an adult bird, (vulnerable) chicks, and a predator. Does postulating talk of FFRs add anything to the <i>pattern<\/i>? Does it make anything more predictable? No. Those FFRs are entirely redundant upon the <i>pattern<\/i> that authorizes them. By Occam\u2019s Razor, they\u2019re unnecessary.<\/p>\n<p>With that, let\u2019s take a quick look at Dennett\u2019s treatment of the role of <i>pattern<\/i>s in his philosophy. First I quote some passages from Dennett, with a bit of commentary, and then I make a few remarks on my somewhat different treatment of <i>pattern<\/i>s. In a third post I\u2019ll be talking about the computational capacities of the mind\/brain.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Dan dennett on patterns and ontology. I want to look at what Dennett has to say about patterns because 1) I introduced the term in my previous discussion, In Search of Dennett\u2019s Free-Floating Rationales [1], and 2) it is interesting for what it says about his philosophy generally. You\u2019ll recall that, in that earlier discussion, [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":661,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1523,47],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-203971","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-computing","category-neuroscience"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/203971","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/661"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=203971"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/203971\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=203971"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=203971"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=203971"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}