What is real life pattern?

Daniel Dennett, answered from the texts and cited to the page.

Daniel Dennett answers

The question of what makes a pattern real rather than merely apparent is one I have spent considerable effort on, and the answer is not as simple as either the naïve realist or the skeptic wants it to be. Start with the basic criterion: a pattern exists in some data if there is a description of that data which is more efficient than the bit map.1

That is the core. If you can compress the description — if you can say "bar-code with 25% noise" rather than listing every pixel — then there is genuinely something there to compress. The pattern is not in the eye of the beholder in any arbitrary sense; it is an objective feature of the data, whether or not anyone has yet found the efficient description.2

But real patterns come in grades, and this is where the philosophy gets interesting. Sometimes we care about exact reproduction of every detail, including the noise. Sometimes we care about the noise in aggregate but not its precise location. And sometimes we simply tolerate or ignore the noise altogether, treating the underlying regularity as the pattern.3

These are not three different patterns; they are three different interests we bring to the same objective structure. Now scale this up to beliefs and desires. Folk psychology works — it has enormous predictive leverage, without which human activity would be just so much Brownian motion, and we would be baffling ciphers to each other — and it works because there are real patterns in human behavior that the intentional stance tracks.4

The patterns are objective: they are there to be detected, not constructed by the observer.5 But they are also patterns that are visible only from a particular vantage point, the way a Turing machine running on Conway's Game of Life is invisible to someone watching cell-by-cell transitions, yet perfectly real and perfectly predictable once you ascend to the right level of description.6

My position sits on a knife-edge between simple realism and simple relativism, and I have always insisted that the knife-edge is the right place to stand.7 The Martians who know every physical fact about our world can still miss the patterns that folk psychology tracks — not because those patterns are fictional, but because pattern-recognition is stance-relative without being observer-invented.8

Sources

  1. A pattern exists in some data—is real—if there is a description of the data that is more efficient than the bit map, whether or not anyone can concoct it.
    Brainchildren__essays_on_designing_minds_Page_116, pp. 116–117
  2. Compression algorithms, as general-purpose pattern-describers, are efficient ways of transmitting exact copies of frames, such as A-F, from one place to another.
    Brainchildren__essays_on_designing_minds_Page_116, pp. 116–117
  3. Here then are three different attitudes we take at various times toward patterns. Sometimes we care about exact description or reproduction of detail, at whatever cost... At other times we care about the noise, but not where in particular it occurs... And sometimes, we simply tolerate or ignore the noise.
    Brainchildren__essays_on_designing_minds_Page_116, pp. 116–117
  4. Without its predictive power, we could have no interpersonal projects or relations at all; human activity would be just so much Brownian motion; we would be baffling ciphers to each other and to ourselves.
    Brainchildren__essays_on_designing_minds_Page_111, pp. 111–113
  5. I claim that the intentional stance provides a vantage point for discerning similarly useful patterns. These patterns are objective—they are there to be detected.
    The Intentional Stance, pp. 50–51
  6. Anyone who hypothesizes that some configuration in the Life world is such a Turing machine can predict its future state with precision, efficiency, and a modicum of risk.
    The Intentional Stance, pp. 50–51
  7. My discussion of Nozick's objection attempts to place my view firmly on the knife-edge between the intolerable extremes of simple realism and simple relativism.
    The Intentional Stance, pp. 48–49
  8. My view is, I insist, a sort of realism, since I maintain that the patterns the Martians miss are really, objectively there to be noticed or overlooked.
    The Intentional Stance, pp. 48–49