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Eugine_Nier comments on 2013 Less Wrong Census/Survey - Less Wrong
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I don't think the concept of "ontologically basic" is coherent.
I personally think it's a strawman, but I don't see why it's necessarily incoherent for people who reject reductionism.
Can you expand?
Why?
Here I understand "ontologically basic" to mean "having no Kolmogorov complexity / not amenable to reductionistic exlanations / does not posses an internal mechanism". Why do you think this is not coherent?
Assuming the standard model of quantum mechanics is more or less correct which enteties are ontologically basic?
1) Leptons and quarks
2) The quantum fields
3) The universal wave function
4) The Hilbert space where said wave function lives
5) The mathematics used to describe the wave function
Interesting, but this does not exactly mean the concrete is incoherent, more that QM isnt playing ball.
I could do this with any other theory of physics just as easily, e.g., in Newtonian mechanics are are particles ontologically basic, or are points in the universal phase space?
Edit: Also, I never said the concrete was incoherent, I said the concept of "ontologically basic" was incoherent.
You're arguing issues of cartography, not geography.
No, I'm saying that the people asking whether something is "ontologically basic" are arguing cartography. Also it's funny how they only ask the question of things they don't believe exist.
Ok I'm in agreement with that.
I don't that is clear cut, because space and points have often often been denied any reality
Concrete was my tablets version of concept.
Before I knew of Hilbert space and the universal wave function, I would have said 1, now I am somewhat confused about that.
There are good reasons not to consider particles ontologically basic. For instance, particle number is not relativistically invariant in quantum field theory. What looks like a vacuum to an inertial observer will not look like a vacuum to an accelerating observer (see here). If the existence of particles depends on something as trivial as an observer's state of motion, it is hard to maintain that they are the basic constituents of the universe.
Thanks! Did not know that.
So, I understand what it would mean for something to not be amenable to reductionist explanations and maybe what it would mean to not have internal mechanisms. What does it mean to not have Kolmogorov complexity? Do you mean that the entity is capable of engaging in non-computable computations? That doesn't seem like a standard part of the supernatural notion, especially because many common supernatural entities aren't any smarter than humans.
What I meant is, that (apart from positional information) you can only give one bit of information about the thing in question: it is there or not. There is no internal complexity to be described. Perhaps I overstreched the meaning of Kolmogorov complexity slightly. Sorry for that.
No.
There's a quite popular view hereabouts according to which the universal wave function is ontologically basic. If that view is correct, or even possibly correct, your construal of "ontologically basic" cannot be, since wave functions do have internal complexity.
Interesting thought. So how would you define ontologically basic?
I don't think that' a slight overstretch: how many bits you can give about something doesn't have much to do with its K-complexity. Moreover, I'm not sure what it means to say that you can only talk about something being somewhere and its existence. How then do you distinguish it from other objects?