DaFranker comments on 2012 Less Wrong Census/Survey - Less Wrong
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Wait, could you explain (or taboo, if that's easier) what you mean by "incoherent"? I don't see what's incoherent about "event which happened because a nonreducible basic element of the building blocks of the universe has complex causal influence on the universe using complex internal rules". Is that the wrong way to interpret "events involving ontologically basic mental entities"?
Does this help?
-Eliezer Yudkowsky, Excluding the supernatural
Well, re-reading the whole post did help a bit.
I'm not sure I agree with the statements that say "this is incoherent a priori", but I haven't explored the question in depth yet. It seems as if one could envision a universe where a certain specific quark (or replace with whatever most-elementary thing turns out to really be most elementary, if any) does unpredictable things and interacts with other selected quarks in the universe in specific ways that maximize the odds of a certain specific event happening later on, "as if" this quark had the intent of making this event happen.
Would this not be a mental entity that cannot be reduced? Perhaps this is exactly the kind of "confusion" Eliezer was talking about.
I think it would have to be conscious? Maybe? Hmm, that is confusing...