Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Dennett's Real Patterns in Science and Nature

Dennett's Real Patterns in Science and Nature

Millhouse, Tyler
Ross, Don
Petersen, Steve

Paperback

PhilosophyCognitionHistory & Philosophy of Science

ISBN10: 0262052032
ISBN13: 9780262052030
Publisher: MIT Press
Published: Mar 31 2026
Pages: 304
Weight: 0.79
Height: 0.88 Width: 5.99 Depth: 8.99
Language: English
How the concept of a pattern, as understood in information science and applied in contemporary AI, can address deep questions in science and philosophy.

The explosive growth of AI and machine learning in recent decades is predicated on the recognition and exploitation of patterns in data. Of course, scientists have engaged in their own--less automated--processes of pattern recognition since the birth of science itself, and biological organisms evolved their own neural networks for pattern recognition long before people and their technology came along.

In his seminal work, Real Patterns, philosopher and cognitive scientist Daniel Dennett laid out a road map for connecting the idea of patterns as understood by information theory to the practices of scientists and to our own cognitive capacity to model and predict the world around us. In this book--the first dedicated to the topic of real patterns--Tyler Millhouse, Steve Petersen, and Don Ross follow this road map. They explore the relevance of patterns to important aspects of both science and nature, including the emergence of high-level structure in physics, the nature of biological species, the measurement of welfare in economics, the evaluation of causal models, and the possibility of understanding in large neural networks.

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