= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
shminux comments on Open Thread, November 16–30, 2012 - 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 (213)
What is left after the reduction is complete? Some irreducible objects (the Greek word is atom) and what? Why do these "atoms" behave the way they do? Are the rules of atomic behavior part of the Nature? Or of our description of it?
I strongly suspect that what is left is not an irreducible "object" in the common sense, but rather that the part about how these atoms behave the way they do is all that is left after a fully complete reduction. No object-style "atom", only the behavior. The behavior is the atom.
Does that help?
Basically, the way I understand it, you don't reduce to quarks and leptons, and then wonder "But how oh how do these quarks do this and that? Why do they do it?". Instead, you reduce to the wave function, and there is no quark left, and nothing left to explain; the behavior of the quark explains both our perception of the presence of some "object", and the interactions / rules / physical laws.
So, suppose you finally added that elusive last term in the equations of the Theory of Everything, and there is nothing to the Universe but "the behavior". You press "Run" and the computers running your model produce a beautiful multiverse out of nothing. Where are the computers and who pressed "Run" to create the universe we live in?
I don't know how to answer that.
To me, the hypothesis "X" where X is an event/behavior is simpler than "R(X)" where R is an overarching something that executes the rules of X. I should then prefer a model of the universe where there is no overarching thinghy that runs behaviors, just the behaviors behaving, over the other way around.
This sounds like there's just some confusion somewhere. If the behavior is a fundamental "Do(X)" and nothing else, then why does there need to be anything above or around that executes or hits run on the behaviors outside the simulation?
The ability to simulate X using R(X) is only very weak evidence that X requires R() (or any R' ) to function.