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Vladimir_Nesov comments on Rationality Quotes - July 2009 - Less Wrong
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I don't believe that breaks anything. Tabooing "reductionism", I don't see how infinity of ontological levels (whatever that could mean) is a surprising view. The problem is with mental concepts, thoughts manifested in the rules of the game, a design implemented in terms of the territory happening to also be engraved in its deepest principles.
I'm afraid you sort of lost me after "mental concepts", so the followong might not apply, but: "deepest principles" make no sense in an appropriate (as worked out by schaffer in the paper) account of infinite levels. His idea is that since every level is grounded by AND grounds another level, all entities on all levels are on an equal footing, including mental entities.
I suspected you might pay attention to that detail. The appropriate generalization just says that you don't expect the same laws to apply at different levels (between levels): a concept in a mind (in a brain, that is a system constructed on top/in terms of lower levels) won't obey the same laws as the lower-level stuff from which the mind is built. There is also a nice antisymmetry here: a mind can look at lower levels and organize its thoughts to model them, but lower levels can't do the same to the thoughts in a mind.
What detail? What generalization of what? Is this supposed to be a refutation? If so, of what? Translation needed.
Sorry for the confusion. The detail of using the word "deepest" that doesn't apply to the case where there is no bottom, and generalization from systems with a bottom to systems without. It was supposed to be a clarification of the sense in which I consider "mental" entities and what would make them irreducible.
Thanks for the attempt to clarify it for me. Do we actually disagree? Anyway, ill try to do a top-level post tomorrow to shake your (apparent) belief that mental entities need to have non-mental parts.
I see this whole discussion as royally confused and not worth pursuing unless a much more technical setting is introduced.