Open Thread: July 2009

Here's our place to discuss Less Wrong topics that have not appeared in recent posts. Have fun building smaller brains inside of your brains (or not, as you please).

Haha if I just downvoted it, then I wouldn't be able to explain what I do mean.

I'm simply attempting to disagree with the logical necessity of reductionism. I said this earlier, I thought it was pretty clear:

My contention is that it's possible to reduce the levels, but not logically necessary-- and I support this contention with the fact that we don't necessarily collapse the levels in our reasoning, and we can't collapse the levels in our imagination.

So, the fact that a painting has a subject is a good example of this: I can't imagine the specific differences between a) the quark-configuration that would lead to me believing its "about a subject", versus b) the quark-configuration that would lead to me believing its just a blob. I can believe that quarks are ultimately responsible, but I'm not obligated to do so by a priori logical necessity.

So I'm not contending anything about what the most fundamental level is. I'm just saying that non-reductionism isn't inconceivable.

I can believe that quarks are ultimately responsible, but I'm not obligated to do so by a priori logical necessity.

This is a slippery concept. With some tiny probability anything is possible, even that 2+2=3. When philosophers argue for what is logically possible and what isn't, they implicitly apply an anthropomorphic threshold. Think of that picture with almost-the-same atoms but completely different message.

The extent to which something is a priori impossible is also probabilistic. You say "impossible", but mean "overwhelmingly improb... (read more)

0loqi17y

I feel that someone should point out how difficult this discussion might be in light of the overwhelming empirical evidence for reductionism. Non-reductionist theories tend to get... reduced. In other words, reductionism's logical status is a fairly fine distinction in practice. That said, I wonder if the claim can't be near-equivalently rephrased "it's impossible to imagine a non-reductionist scenario without populating it with your own arbitrary fictions". Your use of the term "conceivable" seems to mean (or include) something like "choose an arbitrary state space of possible worlds and an observation relation over that space". Clearly anything goes. You're simply expanding your definition of "everything" to include arbitrary chunks of state space you bolted on, some of which are underdetermined by their interactions with every previous part of "everything". I don't have a fully fleshed-out logical theory of everything on hand, so I'll give you the benefit of the doubt that what you're saying isn't logically invalid. Either way, it's pointless. If there's no link between levels, there's no way to distinguish between states in the extended space except by some additional a priori process. Good luck acquiring or communicating evidence for such processes.

5

Open Thread: July 2009

5

5

5

Open Thread: July 2009

5

5