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Will_Newsome comments on Beware Selective Nihilism - Less Wrong Discussion

39 Post author: Wei_Dai 20 December 2012 06:53PM

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Comment author: [deleted] 22 December 2012 04:42:45PM 4 points [-]

If you don't mind a rather primitive question:

If I were to ask you 'which things are ontologically primitive in reality?', what kinds of things would you use to justify your answer? To be clear, I'm not just asking about what your answer is, but what kind of evidence you think is relevant to determining an answer. What, in other words, would things have to look like for you to conclude that human beings were ontologically primitive in reality (and not just in our usual models).

I ask, among other reasons, because although I'm confident that phenomena relevant to human beings, like behaviors, thoughts, biological processes, etc. are reducible to more fundamental physical systems, it's not obvious to me that this straightforwardly means that those more fundamental physical systems are more ontologically primitive than human beings. So far as I understand things, the physical, chemical, and biological theories we use to explain phenomena relevant to human beings don't purport to make claims about ontological primitiveness.

Comment author: Will_Newsome 22 December 2012 08:20:08PM -1 points [-]

Sorta related. (Someone write "Metametametaphysics" plz.)