I agree. Many of the sentences in this essay have something horribly wrong with the thought process behind them, but I can't even begin to describe what it is. There is a similar problem with the Umberto Eco quote below.
The above quote begins with this:
According to Heisenberg and the Second Law of Thermodynamics any attempt to do so in the real world will expose uncertainty and generate disorder. Taken together, these three notions support the idea that any inward-oriented and continued effort to improve the match-up of concept with observed reality will only increase the degree of mismatch
I am pretty sure that Boyd is badly mangling Heisenberg, the Second Law of Thermodynamics, and Godel's Incompleteness Theorem, or his extrapolations are way off.
In fact, someone mentioning Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, the Second Law of Thermodynamics, and Godel's Incompleteness Theorem all in one place, triggers my Bayesian epistemic spam filter.
Some people's minds seem to be infected with a strange solipsistic and skeptical epistemic disease where they think that trying to understand reality is futile, and will lead to either increasing mismatch of the map to the territory (in the case of this quote), or some other "terrible" results (in the case of the Eco quote).
How the hell do people come with ideas like these??
trying to understand reality is futile, and will lead to either increasing mismatch of the map to the territory
How the hell do people come with ideas like these??
That's actually a position of reasonable people who engage in non-greedy reductionism, mostly replying to greedy reductionists (to use Dennett's terminology).
To give an example, suppose you're trying to get better at playing chess on a chess program running on a computer. Further suppose that the computer you're using is a Turing machine being implemented in Conway's Game of Life. Does unders...
(Since there didn't seem to be one for this month, and I just ran across a nice quote.)
A monthly thread for posting any interesting rationality-related quotes you've seen recently on the Internet, or had stored in your quotesfile for ages.