Jadagul comments on Possibility and Could-ness - Less Wrong

34 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 14 June 2008 04:38AM

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Comment author: Jadagul 15 June 2008 09:09:36AM 0 points [-]

Joesph: I don't think I added more constraints, though it's a possibility. What extra constraints do you think I added?

As for not salvaging it, I can see why you would say that, but what word should be used to take its place? Mises commented somewhere in On Human Action that we can be philosophical monists and practical dualists; I believe that everything is ultimately reducible to (quasi?-)deterministic quantum physics, but that doesn't mean that's the most efficient way to analyze most situations. When I'm trying to catch a ball I don't try to model the effect of the weak nuclear force on the constituent protons. When I'm writing a computer program I don't even try to simulate the logic gates, much less the electromagnetic reactions that cause them to function. And when I'm dealing with people it's much more effective to say to myself, "given these options, what will he choose?" This holds even though I could in principle, were I omniscient and unbounded in computing power, calculate this deterministically from the quantum state of his brain.

Or, in other words, we didn't throw out Newtonian mechanics when we discovered Relativity. We didn't discard Maxwell when we learned about quantum electrodynamics. Why should this be different?