= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
Tuukka_Virtaperko comments on Reductionism - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (150)
You seem to be overthinking this. Reductionism is "merely" a really useful cognition technique, because calculating everything at the finest possible level is hopelessly inefficient. Perhaps a practical simple example is needed:
An AI that can use reductionism can say "Oh, that collection of pixels within my current view is a dog, and this collection is a man, and the other collection is a leash", and go on to match against (and develop on its own) patterns about objects at the coarser-than-pixel size of dogs, men, and leashes. Without reductionism, it would be forced to do the pattern matching for everything, even for complex concepts like "Man walking a dog", directly at the pixel level, which is not impossible but is certainly a lot slower to run and harder to update.
If you've ever refactored a common element out in your code into its own module, or even if you've used a library or high-level language, you are also using reductionism. The non-reductionistic alternative would be something like writing every program from scratch, in machine code.
Okay. That sounds very good. And it would seem to be in accordance with this statement:
If reductionism does not entail that I must construct the notion of a territory and include it into my conceptualizations at all times, it's not a problem. I now understand even better why I was confused by this. This kind of reductionism is not reductive physicalism. It's hardly a philosophical statement at all, which is good. I would say that "the notion of higher levels being out there in the territory" is meaningless, but expressing disbelief to that notion is apparently intended to convey approximately the same meaning.
RP doesn't yet actually include reduction. It's about next on the to do list. Currently it includes an emergence loop that is based on the power set function. The function produces a staggering amount of information in just a few cycles. It seems to me that this is because instead of accounting for emergence relations the mind actually performs, it accounts for all defined emergence relations the mind could perform. So the theory is clearly still under construction, and it doesn't yet have any kind of an algorithm part. I'm not much of a coder, so I need to work with someone who is. I already know one mathematician who likes to do this stuff with me. He's not interested of the metaphysical part of the theory, and even said he doesn't want to know too much about it. :) I'm not guaranteeing RP can be used for anything at all, but it's interesting.