jwdink comments on Open Thread: July 2009 - Less Wrong

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Comment author: byrnema 07 July 2009 08:32:35PM *  -1 points [-]

The two computer screens depicting completely different subjects have almost everything in common, in that they are of the same material. However, where they differ -- namely, the color of each pixel -- is where all the information about the painting is contained. So the screens have enough different information (at the quark level) to distinguish what the paintings are about.

So I don't think you are getting at why "about-ness" isn't related to the quarks of the painting. I think a better example is a stick figure. A child's stick figure can be anybody. What the painting is about is in her head, or your head, or in the head of anyone thinking about what the painting is about.

So it's not in the quarks of the painting at all. "About-ness" is in the quarks of the thoughts of the person looking at the painting, right? (And according to reductionism, completely determined by the quarks in the painting, the quarks of the observer, and the quarks of their mutual environment.)

Above, you wrote:

there's also nothing legitimate on the level of quarks [of the painting] that could be used to differentiate between a painting that has a subject and a painting that is just random blobs

Thus I agree with this statement as it is written, because I think the difference in the subjects of the paintings are found instead in the thoughts of the beholder. Would you agree that there is a legitimate difference at the level of quarks between the thought that a painting has a subject and the thought that a painting is just random blobs?

Comment author: jwdink 07 July 2009 09:25:32PM *  0 points [-]

Thus I agree with this statement as it is written, because I think the difference in the subjects of the paintings are found instead in the thoughts of the beholder. Would you say that there is a legitimate difference between the thought that a painting has a subject and the thought that a painting is just random blobs?

But surely there's something in the painting that is causing the observer to have different thoughts for different subjects. But that something in the painting is not anything discernible on the level of quarks. This is why I brought the example up, after all. It was in response to:

if the boring old normal model is correct, your brain is made of quarks, and so your brain will only be able to envision and concretely predict things that can predicted by quarks.

I believe (I could be wrong, since I started this thread asking for a clarification) that the implication of this statement (derived from the context) was that "brains made of quarks can't think about things as if they're irreducibly not made of quarks."

First of all, saying "brains made of quarks can't think [blank] because quarks themselves aren't [blank]," seems to me equivalent to saying that paintings can't be about something because quarks can't be about something. It's confusing the abilities and properties of one level for those of another. I know this is a stretch, but be generous, because I think the parallelism is important.

Second of all, we think about things as if they're not quarks all the time. We can "predict" or "envision" the subject of the painting without thinking about the quark coordinates at all (and such coordinates would not help us envision or predict anything to do with the subject).

So I clearly need some help understanding what Eliezer actually meant. I find no reason to believe that brains made of quarks can't think about things as if they're not made of quarks. (Or rather, Eliezer only seems to allow this if it's a "confusion." I don't understand what he means by this.)

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