Eliezer makes the further claim in those pieces that non-reductionism is based on confusion and doesn't lead to a coherent worldview, but that's not a property of reductionism.
| If you take reductionism for granted, and some entity does not easily fit it, then you are seduced into eliminating that entity.
Are there any actual individuals you have in mind when you make this generalization? To my knowledge, I have never heard of an individual ignoring observed phenomena they could not predict reductively.
Ok, I wasn't specific enough. I meant mainly that Eliezer also claimed that there is a fundamental level and that there are no funda-mental entities.
Are there any actual individuals you have in mind when you make this generalization? To my knowledge, I have never heard of an individual ignoring observed phenomena they could not predict reductively.
I take it you mean explain reductively? Anyway, behaviourism (and its problems with mental entities) seems the locus classicus. Or what about eliminativists like the churchlands or dennett (for qualia)? Or hartry field for numbers? There must be lots of others.
(Last month's started a little late, I thought I'd bring it back to its original schedule.)
A monthly thread for posting any interesting rationality-related quotes you've seen recently on the Internet, or had stored in your quotesfile for ages.