Retropost, 2005: Azar y sentido

 

Azar y sentido

Miércoles 12 de octubre de 2005

En un artículo que estoy editando discute el autor el papel del azar en la literatura, diciendo que de hecho el azar en los mundos de las ficciones narrativas es sólo una simulación de azar, que las novelas y relatos son construcciones intencionales que por su misma naturaleza son contrarias al azar, creándose así la paradoja de que los acontecimientos casuales en los mundos narrados están de hecho determinados intencionalmente.

Añado esta anotación: "But does the intentionality of of aesthetic artifacts exhaust their significance? Psychoanalytic critics, for instance, point out many non-intentional but still overdetermined processes in creation. Isn’t there a space for chance in these processes? It could be argued that the approaches falling under the umbrella of a "hermeneutics of suspicion" try to explain away much of this element of chance without having resource to the author’s intention but still finding significance instead of randomness in the non-intentional elements of the work."

Si hallar sentido consiste en reducir el papel del azar en la génesis de los acontecimientos, se abre una interesante tensión dialéctica entre el azar y el sentido: un exceso de sentido produce un sinsentido, y pasamos de sospechar del objeto interpretado a sospechar del método interpretativo que tanto pretende explicar... porque elimina el elemento de azar que necesitamos para la producción de más sentido.

Clueless Agents as No Mind's Marionettes

A passage from Daniel Dennett's From Bacteria to Bach and Back:

 

The feats of clueless agents should not be underestimated. The termites' castle, the cuckoo chick's ovicide, and many other behavioral marvels are accomplished with only the sort of behavioral comprehension that amounts to practical know-how, unarticulated and unconsidered. When we human observers/explainers/predictors confront this well-designed excellence, we automatically set about figuring out the reasons why plants and animals do what they do, reverse engineering them with the aid of the intentional stance. And, as we have seen, when we do this it is common and natural to impute more understanding to an organism than it actually has, on the reasonable grounds that the behavior is manifestly clever, and whose cleverness is it, if not the organism's? Ironically, if we were creationists, we could comfortably attribute all the understanding to God and wouldn't feel so compelled to endow the organisms with it. They could all be God's marionettes. It was Darwin's discovery and exposure of the mindless process of natural selection, with its power to generate free-floating rationales, that freed our imaginations to continue reverse engineering all Nature's marvels without feeling an obligation to identify a mind that harbors the reasons we uncover.

 

("Consciousness as an evolved user-illusion", p. 339)