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RogerS comments on Removing Bias From the Definition of Reductionism - Less Wrong
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Comments (48)
It's not clear to me that's a complete response. It seems to be assuming that all instances of disagreement between reductionists and non-reductionists are linguistic, rather than causal. It looks to me like Bryan thinks that his qualia, like pain, are actually out there, and are not just very complicated ensembles of things reductionists like building models out of, like quarks and wavefunctions and so on.
It seems like attempting to resolve Bryan's disagreement with Robin about where Bryan's pain is located (B's "in my mind, not my brain" vs. R's "in your brain, which is also your mind") by claiming "well, of course Bryan's mental model of his pain doesn't exist in reality by definition" seems to be assuming definitions of 'mental model,' 'pain,' and 'reality' that I don't think Bryan would agree with.
What do you mean when you say "but it's information that is downloaded"? That the monist model does not completely describe reality? That computer programming is easier with the dualist model than the monist model? That information lives in a nonphysical universe that communicates with the physical universe, such that only having the physical universe would be insufficient for computers to run?
Re my claim:
On reflection I suspect the disagreement here is that I am doubting that Bryan could consciously deny this, and you & EY & others are suspecting that he is unconsciously denying it. Well, that's a theory. I have added an edit to my post recognizing this. This seems to boil down to the LW-wiki "definition" not really defining what reductionists believe, but rather defining why they believe certain criticisms of reductionism are wrong. That at least would explain why it sounds biased!
To answer more fully: The 'monist' model without information as a category describes reality at any instant but does not describe what is conserved from one instant to the next. Any activity that requires an intelligible account of what is going on is easier with the concept of information as a separate "thing". Of course, information doesn't belong in a nonphysical universe, since it obeys physical laws. Nevertheless the fact that it has a life of its own, with laws distinct to the laws specific to the materials which embody it an any given time, give it part (but not all) of the character of a separate physical but intangible substance.
The point of my analogy was to emphasise that all categories are man-made, including "substance", so that "substance counting" has an element of arbitrariness. Actually I don't find that treating "mind" as a separate substance is helpful!
If you mean infromation, it is not clear that that is conserved. And I don't see how a sufficiently detailed description of reality at the quark level could fail to describe all the information.
OK, not strictly "conserved", except that I understand quantum mechanics requires that the information in the universe must be conserved. But what I meant is that if you download a file to a different medium and then delete the original, the information is still the same although the descriptions at quark level are utterly different. Thus there is a sense in which a quark level description of reality fails to capture an important fact about it (the identity of the two files in information terms).
I don't think this has anything to do with dualism in the Cartesian sense, it's just an example of my general preference for not taking metaphysical positions without reference to the context. I'm afraid I don't know the label for that!
..absent collapse..
But a 4D descriptions of al the changes involved in the copy-and-delete process would be sufficient to show that the information in the first medium is equivalent to the information in the second. In fact, your problem would be false positives, since determinism will always show that subsequent state contains the same information as a previous one.
Ah, is that so.
Yes, I can see that that's one way of looking at it.
I don't think so, since the information I would be comparing in this case (the "file contents") would be just a reduction of the information in two regions of space-time.
And under determinsim, all the information in any spatial slice will be reproduced throughout time. Hence the false positives.
I'm not clear what you are meaning by "spatial slice". That sounds like all of space at a particular moment in time. In speaking of a space-time region I am speaking of a small amount of space (e.g. that occupied by one file on a hard drive) at a particular moment in time.
Your can prove conservation of information over small space times volumes without positing information as an ontological extra ingredient. You will also get false positives over larger space time volumes.