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).
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As I said, explaining != predicting.
Is that my option 3? ETA: I still don't know what your point is. Try s/explaining/predicting in my previous comment.
ETA 2: The meaning of your original comment is what I really don't get. Eliezer is saying that reality consists of elementary particles, not elementary particles and other things. You don't seem to be disagreeing with this, but you're depreciating the proposition somehow. You say it's not predictive, but what is the significance of that? The fact that every natural number has a successor won't help you do arithmetic, but it's still true; and... (read more)