Furcas comments on Less Wrong Q&A with Eliezer Yudkowsky: Ask Your Questions - Less Wrong

16 Post author: MichaelGR 11 November 2009 03:00AM

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Comment author: Furcas 16 November 2009 05:33:36PM *  4 points [-]

Eliezer, in Excluding the Supernatural, you wrote:

Ultimately, reductionism is just disbelief in fundamentally complicated things. If "fundamentally complicated" sounds like an oxymoron... well, that's why I think that the doctrine of non-reductionism is a confusion, rather than a way that things could be, but aren't.

"Fundamentally complicated" does sound like an oxymoron to me, but I can't explain why. Could you? What is the contradiction?

Comment author: anonym 17 November 2009 07:31:33AM 6 points [-]

Isn't the contradiction that "complicated" means having more parts/causes/aspects than are readily comprehensible, and "fundamental" things never are complicated, because if they were, they could be broken down into more fundamental things that were less complicated? The fact that things invariably get simpler and more basic as we move closer to the foundational level is in tension with things getting more complicated as we move down.

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