Knowing that the former can be eventually decomposed into subatomic particles adds nothing to our understanding of psychology.
So? What query are you trying to answer?
Are you asking whether we ought to study and understand reductionism? Answer: yes, if we don't get reductionism, we might miss that uploads, etc. are possible.
Are you saying it may not be worth it to learn all the low-level detail, because our higher abstractions aren't all that leaky. Answer: agree for most things, but some require the lower stuff.
Why are you bringing this up?
I thought I had clearly explained it in my original top-level comment: the underlying structure is irrelevant for the entities a few levels removed.
the universe itself has only the single level of fundamental physics - reality doesn't explicitly compute protons, only quarks.
And if it did, it wouldn't matter for atomic physics and up.
Today's post, Reductionism was originally published on 16 March 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):
Discuss the post here (rather than in the comments to the original post).
This post is part of the Rerunning the Sequences series, where we'll be going through Eliezer Yudkowsky's old posts in order so that people who are interested can (re-)read and discuss them. The previous post was Qualitatively Confused, and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.
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