Since Eliezer has talked about the truth of reductionism and the emptiness of "emergence", I thought of him when listening to Robert Laughlin on EconTalk (near the end of the podcast). Laughlin was arguing that reductionism is experimentally wrong and that everything, including the universal laws of physics, are really emergent. I'm not sure if that means "elephants all the way down" or what.
It's very silly. What he's saying is that there are properties at high levels of organizations that don't exist at low levels of organizations.
As Eliezer says, emergence is trivial. Everything that isn't quarks is emergent.
His "universality" argument seems to be that different parts can make the same whole. Well of course they can.
He certainly doesn't make any coherent arguments. Maybe he does in his book?
This thread is for the discussion of Less Wrong topics that have not appeared in recent posts. If a discussion gets unwieldy, celebrate by turning it into a top-level post.