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Azathoth123 comments on 2014 Less Wrong Census/Survey - Less Wrong
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Of course it's not clear what "ontologically basic" means.
The problem is it's not always clear what it means to "reduce" one entity to another.
http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Reductionism_%28sequence%29
You can take a car to bits, or a brain to bits, but you can't take a soul to bits.
...
Although horocruxes work by ripping the soul apart. So souls in canon Harry Potter are not supernatural by that definition... which seems dubious. Maybe they are supernatural, but dark magic can turn them natural?
Nope. The bits are still soul-bits, and they're still made of soul. The scalar is fractional, but the substance is still the same.
Ahh. I was thinking that "irreducible" implied "indivisible".
Do religious people think that the soul is irreducible? Even if you can't reduce it to atoms, maybe you could argue that it reduces to component memories, emotions and so forth.
The only religious belief I'm familiar with that'd be relevant is the doctrine of transsubstantiation, which holds that a wafer that goes through the communion process still has the form of a wafer, but it has the substance of Jesus' body. (Likewise, wine becomes wine-like Jesus blood). The distinction between shape, quantity, taste, feel, etc. on one hand and substance on the other seems like it's actually in line with what I said above, but I'm not enough of a theologian to say for sure.
Well, IIRC Dante Alighieri did, mentioning inattentional blindness as evidence of that.
Being able to analyze X in terms of smaller components is not necessarily the same as being able to split X into smaller pieces. For example, it is possible to split up 1 into 1/3 and 2/3, but 1 is nonetheless ontologically basic as a numerical entity...
I guess. But the above paragraph feels extremely confused and semantic. It is probably best not to try to wallow into metaphysics without a specific goal in mind.
Why are you reducing to bits rather than atoms? Which is more basic?
I meant bits as a synonym for 'pieces' not as in terms of information.
That still leaves the question of whether brains should be reduced to atoms or bits unresolved?
You can reduce a brain to atoms, and a mind to bits?
Possible bits are more basic, since physics seems to run on maths, if that makes sense. But I wouldn't say this with especially high confidence.
That's my point. Being "ontologically basic" is an extremely subtle concept.
Suppose I believe that "mental" and "physical" are both forms of information, and the bit is an ontologically basic mental/physical/information thing. Do I then believe in the supernatural?