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Vladimir_Nesov comments on Open Thread: July 2009 - Less Wrong
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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.