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Eliezer_Yudkowsky comments on Open Thread: July 2009 - Less Wrong
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You want to be very careful every time you find yourself saying that.
And that too.
Eliezer, in Excluding the Supernatural, you wrote:
"Fundamentally complicated" does sound like an oxymoron to me, but I'm not sure I could say why. Could you?
I'm having the same difficulty. Aren't quarks (or whatever is the most elemental bit of matter) fundamentally complicated? What's meant by "complicated"?
(Sorry for being so chatty.)
Are you actually implying that quantum mechanics is remotely comparable in complexity to paintings and artistic "subjects"? Please direct me to the t-shirt that summarizes all of artistic critique.
This is probably wrong. The important point is that physics isn't a mind, and less so human mind or your mind, so it doesn't care about your high-level concepts, which makes their materialization in reality impossible. Even though the territory computes much more data than people, it's data not structured in a way human concepts are.
To loqi and Nesov:
Again, both of your responses seem to hinge on the fact that my challenge below is easily answerable, and has already been answered:
To loqi: Where do we draw the line? Where is an entity too complex to be considered fundamental, whereas another is somewhat less complex and can therefore be considered simple? What would be a priori illogical about every entity in the universe being explainable in terms of quarks, except for one type of entity, which simply followed different laws? (Maybe these laws wouldn't even be deterministic, but that's apparently not a knockdown criticism of them, right? From what I understand, QM isn't deterministic, by some interpretations.)
To Nesov: Again, you're presupposing that you know what's part of the territory, and what's part of the map, and then saying "obviously, the territory isn't affected by the map." Sure. But this presupposes the territory doesn't have any irreducible entities. It doesn't demonstrate it.
Don't get me wrong: Occam's razor will indeed (and rightly) push us to suspect that there are no irreducible entities. But it will do this based on some previous success with reduction-- it is an inference, not an a priori necessity.
I don't know. I wasn't supporting the main thread of argument, I was responding specifically to your implicit comparison of the complexity of quarks and "about-ness", and pointing out that the complexity of the latter (assuming it's well-defined) is orders of magnitude higher than that of the former. "About-ness" may seem simpler to you if you think about it in terms that hide the complexity, but it's there. A similar trick is possible with QM... everything is just waves. QM possesses some fundamental level of complexity, but I wouldn't agree in this context that it's "fundamentally complicated".
I see what you mean. It's certainly a good distinction to make, even if it's difficult to articulate. Again, though, I think it's Occam's Razor and induction that makes us prefer the simpler entities-- they aren't the sole inhabitants of the territory by default.
I would assert that, by definition, a meaningful concept is reducible to some other set of concepts. If this chain of meaning can be extended to unambiguous physics, then their "materialization in reality" is certainly possible, it's just a complicated boundary in Thingspace.
Certainly-- that was somewhat sloppy of me. In my defense, however, a priori and conceivability/imaginability are pretty inextricably tied. Additionally, you yourself used the word "envision."
It would perhaps be helpful if you could clarify what you meant when you said:
Your usage doesn't seem to fit into the Kantian sense of the term-- the unity of my experience of the world is not conditioned by everything being reducible. What do you mean when you say irreducibility is a priori logically incoherent?
See blog post links in Priors. A priori incoherent means that you don't need data about the world to come to a conclusion (i.e. in this case the statement is logically false).
This doesn't really answer the question, though. I know that a priori means "prior to experience", but what does this consist of? Originally, for something to be "a priori illogical", it was supposed to mean that it couldn't be thought without contradicting oneself, because of pre-experiential rules of thought. An example would be two straight lines on a flat surface forming a bounded figure-- it's not just wrong, but inconceivable. As far as I can tell, an irreducible entity doesn't possess this inconceivability, so I'm trying to figure out what Eliezer meant.
(He mentions some stuff about being unable to make testable predictions to confirm irreducibility, but as I've already said, this seems to presuppose that reducibility is the default position, not prove it.)