Richard4 comments on Hand vs. Fingers - Less Wrong

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

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (94)

Sort By: Old

You are viewing a single comment's thread.

Comment author: Frank_Hirsch 30 March 2008 04:17:15PM 1 point [-]

PK: I don't see the ++ in your nice example, it's perfectly valid C... =)

Caledonian, Ian C.: I know of no models of reality that have superior explanatory power than the standard reductionist one-level-to-bind-them-all position (apologies for the pun). So why add more? In a certain way "our maps [are] part of reality too", but not in any fundamental sense. To simulate a microchip doing a FFT, it's quite sufficient to simulate the physical processes in it's logic gates. You need not even know what the chip is actually supposed to do. You just need a very precise description of the chip. If you do know what it's doing, it's of course much more efficient to directly use the same algorithm it is also using. That will also dramatically cut down on the length of it's description. But that does not make the FFT algorithm fundamental in any way. It is just a way to look at what is happening. I mean, really, this shouldn't be so hard to grasp...