Phil_Goetz2 comments on Hand vs. Fingers - Less Wrong

25 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 30 March 2008 12:36AM

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Comment author: Phil_Goetz2 30 March 2008 04:08:45AM 6 points [-]

I'm confused as to what your purpose is with this series on reductionism. Is there a particular anti-reductionist position you're combating?

Earlier, you wrote,

Reductionism is not a positive belief, but rather, a disbelief that the higher levels of simplified multilevel models are out there in the territory.

I don't think your typical anti-reductionist is concerned about the existence of different levels of models. I've never heard one ask "How can you model the plane without the wings?"

Anti-reductionists are opposed to models in general. An anti-reductionist believes that a collection of things has properties that are not the results of the combined properties of the things in the collection, let alone of a model. For example, they would say that a human has free will, even though the constituents of the human are deterministic; or that a human has a soul, but if you constructed a human from parts, it wouldn't; or that representations in a human brain have meaning, while representations in a computer cannot; or that a human brain has consciousness, etc.

So I don't think what you're writing addresses what it is that reductionists believe, that non-reductionists don't believe.

Anti-reductionism equals spiritualism, and it is not the opposite of materialism, but of science. Science is not materialistic, since we believe in fields. Also, if you discovered that spirits were composed of magnetic fields, and conducted experiments on them, you would still be a scientist. The spiritualist, by contrast, uses the term "spirit" to name something that can't be explained. Anti-reductionism = spiritualism = the belief that there exist complex phenomena ("spirits") with no explanations.