= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
Will_Sawin comments on Less Wrong: Open Thread, September 2010 - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (610)
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?
Yet another example of a Nobel prize winner in disagreement with Eliezer within his own discipline.
What is wrong with these guys?
Why if they would just read the sequences, they would learn the correct way for words like "reduction" and "emergence" to be used in physics.
To be fair, "reductionism is experimentally wrong" is a statement that would raise some argument among Nobel laureates as well.
Argument from some Nobelists. But agreement from others. Google on the string "Philip Anderson reductionism emergence" to get some understanding of what the argument is about.
My feeling is that everyone in this debate is correct, including Eliezer, except for one thing - you have to realize that different people use the words "reductionism" and "emergence" differently. And the way Eliezer defines them is definitely different from the way the words are used (by Anderson, for example) in condensed matter physics.
If the first hit is a fair overview, I can see why you're saying it's a confusion in terms; the only outright error I saw was confusing "derivable" with "trivially derivable."
If you're saying that nobody important really tries to explain things by just saying "emergence" and handwaving the details, like EY has suggested, you may be right. I can't recall seeing it.
Of course, I don't think Eliezer (or any other reductionist) has said that throwing away information so you can use simpler math isn't useful when you're using limited computational power to understand systems which would be intractable from a quantum perspective, like everything we deal with in real life.