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aaronsw comments on Mixed Reference: The Great Reductionist Project - Less Wrong
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I guess I must have misunderstood something somewhere along the way, since I don't see where in this sequence you provide "constructive accounts of how to build meaningful thoughts out of 'merely' effective constituents" . Indeed, you explicitly say "For a statement to be ... true or alternatively false, it must talk about stuff you can find in relation to yourself by tracing out causal links." This strikes me as parallel to Searle's view that consciousness imposes meaning.
But, more generally, Searle says his life's work is to explain how things like "money" and "human rights" can exist in "a world consisting entirely of physical particles in fields of force"; this strikes me as akin to your Great Reductionist Project.
Someone should tell him this has already been done: dissolving that kind of confusion is literally part of LessWrong 101, i.e. the Mind Projection Fallacy. Money and human rights and so forth are properties of minds modeling particles, not properties of the particles themselves.
That this is still his (or any other philosopher's) life's work is kind of sad, actually.
I guess my phrasing was unclear. What Searle is trying to do is generate reductions for things like "money" and "human rights"; I think EY is trying to do something similar and it takes him more than just one article on the Mind Projection Fallacy. (Even once you establish that it's properties of minds, not particles, there's still a lot of work left to do.)
Why? Did I mention consciousness somewhere? Is there some reason a non-conscious software program hooked up to a sensor, couldn't do the same thing?
I don't think Searle and I agree on what constitutes a physical particle. For example, he thinks 'physical' particles are allowed to have special causal powers apart from their merely formal properties which cause their sentences to be meaningful. So far as I'm concerned, when you tell me about the structure of something's effects on the particle fields, there shouldn't be anything left after that - anything left is extraphysical.
Searle's views have nothing to do with attributing novel properties to fundamental particles. They are more to do with identifying mental properties with higher-levle physical properties, which are themselves irreducible in a sense (but also reducible in another sense).
That's confusing. What senses?
See the link I gave to start with.