Aaron_Boyden comments on Reductionism - Less Wrong
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Comments (150)
One minor quibble; how do we know there is any most basic level?
Agreed. Why would we believe a quark is not "emergent"? Could be turtles all the way down....
Levels are an attribute of the map. The territory only has one level. Its only level is the most basic one.
Let's consider a fractal. The Mandelbrot set can be made by taking the union of infinitely many iterations. You could think of each additional iteration as a better map. That being said, either a point is in the Mandelbrot set or it is not. The set itself only has one level.
Interesting analogy!
Because things happen, if there was no most basic level, figuring out what happens would be an infinite recursion with no base case. Not even the universe's computation could find the answer.