Tiiba3 comments on Hand vs. Fingers - Less Wrong

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

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Comment author: Tiiba3 30 March 2008 07:03:02PM 2 points [-]

I'm pretty confused by this discussion. People toss out terms like reductionist or anti-reductionist, and I can't even tell what they disagree about.

Here's what I know:

1) There are quarks and electrons, maybe some strings too. Nobody seems to dispute the quarks and electrons, at least. There are also clusters of particles.

2) Everything above that level is an abstraction that only exists in our heads. Yeah, those atoms really are near each other, but the only thing that makes them a "computer" is that we use them for computing. Same applies to brains and minds.

3) Still, calling a spade a spade is useful, so we do it. Not because it's "really" a spade, but because we can't reason quickly about innumerable swarms of quarks.

And that is all. Call it reductionism, call it anti-reductionism, that's all there is to it. There are no spadetrons, no mindtrons and (so far) no computrons.

So, what is the dispute over?