Comment on Mixed Reference: The Great Reductionist Project

Sat, 08 Dec 2012 00:23:03 GMT

As I said above, "Some properties are not reducible to physics or logic." is a meaningful statement that is incompatible with the GRT world-view. It is meaningful, though it may be false; if the denial of GRT were meaningless, then GRT would be a tautology, and Eliezer would assign it Pr approaching 1, whereas in fact he assigns it Pr .5.

So we're assuming for the purposes of your argument here that the GRT is about meaningfulness, and we should distinguish this from your (and perhaps EY's) considered view of the GRT. So lets call the 'meaningfulness' version I attributed to EY GRTm, and the one you attribute to him GRTt.

We can gloss the difference thusly: the GRTt states that anything true must be expressible in physical+logical, or merely logical terms (tautologies, etc.).

The GRTm states that anything true or false must be expressible physical+logical, or merely logical terms.

Your argument appears to be that on the GRTm view, the sentence "some properties are not reducible to physics or logic" would be meaningless rather than false. You take this to be a reductio, because that sentence is clearly meaningful and false. Why do you think that, on the GRTm, this sentence would be meaningless? The GRTm view, along with the GRTt view, allows that false statements can be meaningful. And I see no reason to think that the above sentence couldn't be expressed in physics+logic, or merely logical terms.

So I'm not seeing the force of the reductio. You don't argue for the claim that "some properties are not reducible to physics or logic" would be meaningless on the GRTm view, so could you go into some more detail there?

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