[SEQ RERUN] Reductionism

MinibearRex

Today's post, Reductionism was originally published on 16 March 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

We build models of the universe that have many different levels of description. But so far as anyone has been able to determine, the universe itself has only the single level of fundamental physics - reality doesn't explicitly compute protons, only quarks.

Discuss the post here (rather than in the comments to the original post).

This post is part of the Rerunning the Sequences series, where we'll be going through Eliezer Yudkowsky's old posts in order so that people who are interested can (re-)read and discuss them. The previous post was Qualitatively Confused, and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.

Sequence reruns are a community-driven effort. You can participate by re-reading the sequence post, discussing it here, posting the next day's sequence reruns post, or summarizing forthcoming articles on the wiki. Go here for more details, or to have meta discussions about the Rerunning the Sequences series.

Today's post, Reductionism was originally published on 16 March 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

We build models of the universe that have many different levels of description. But so far as anyone has been able to determine, the universe itself has only the single level of fundamental physics - reality doesn't explicitly compute protons, only quarks.

do you seriously think that one can potentially renormalize quarks to cognitive biases?

Are you saying that such a task would be prohibitively difficult, and presumably not something that is worth the effort, or are you saying that doing this is impossible in principle?

I don't think the renormalization group flow has anything to do with the topic, honestly.