Esar comments on Beware Selective Nihilism - Less Wrong Discussion
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I'm trying to get some grip on the relation between ontologically primitive things and ontologically non-primitive things. A second question lurking about here is one raised by some of EY's recent talk about ontology as he would want it programmed into an AI.
We didn't all start by understanding ontological primitives and discover that human beings exist. We started with human beings and discovered that facts about human beings are reducible to facts about ontological primitives (discovering what those primitives were along the way). But does the fact that we went from human beings down to ontological primitives mean that something that started from ontological primitives would discover human beings?
But if the question isn't clear, or feels unmotivating, then I withdraw it, and I appreciate your answers thus far.