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Vaniver comments on Removing Bias From the Definition of Reductionism - Less Wrong Discussion
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Comments (48)
Have you checked to make sure this is the case? As far as I can tell, this is a common dualist position.
The answer is in the rest of the sentence that you truncated! I imagine a dualist would say that there is something out there in the territory which you consider to be a manifestation of a model higher level, but they don't. That isn't the same.
I don't find the monist/dualist distinction helpful. Computers have hardware and information: that's a dualist model, and it has served very well as a model. At any given instant, the information is a state of the hardware, which requires a monist model, but it's information that is downloaded etc. So is information "stuff"? Depends what you mean by "stuff". In short it's an argument about definitions in the bad sense of insisting about the "true" meaning.
Not really, since the information/computation is always predicable from a sufficiently detailed description of the hardware physics.
It's not clear to me that's a complete response. It seems to be assuming that all instances of disagreement between reductionists and non-reductionists are linguistic, rather than causal. It looks to me like Bryan thinks that his qualia, like pain, are actually out there, and are not just very complicated ensembles of things reductionists like building models out of, like quarks and wavefunctions and so on.
It seems like attempting to resolve Bryan's disagreement with Robin about where Bryan's pain is located (B's "in my mind, not my brain" vs. R's "in your brain, which is also your mind") by claiming "well, of course Bryan's mental model of his pain doesn't exist in reality by definition" seems to be assuming definitions of 'mental model,' 'pain,' and 'reality' that I don't think Bryan would agree with.
What do you mean when you say "but it's information that is downloaded"? That the monist model does not completely describe reality? That computer programming is easier with the dualist model than the monist model? That information lives in a nonphysical universe that communicates with the physical universe, such that only having the physical universe would be insufficient for computers to run?
Sorry no time for a full answer, but roughly, yes, in a sense I do think that many of these disagreements turn out to be linguistic if you dig far enough. But if they are causal, the definition needs to compare two intelligible models of causality, not define one in a self-contradictory way. My reply to buybuydandavis may also help clarify.
Yes, and anything else that requires an intelligible account of what is going on. You start with a monist model and then you have to define something called or synonymous with information. In my understanding that makes it a dualist model. (I hope my draft next discussion, Karma permitting(!), will elucidate further.)
I don't see any evidence that information is "extra", ontologically.
From:
and
it looks to me like you don't actually disagree with the definition of reductionism quoted in your post, and it seems like your primary concern is a combination of not being fair to critics of reductionism and a definition that doesn't distinguish between kinds of reductionism.
Those concerns are worth considering, but I think you're wrong on at least the first. The critics of reductionism that this post is targeted at are the Navy Gunners who think that GR and Newtonian Mechanics are different parts of the territory, not different maps that describe the territory at different levels of detail and completeness.
You mention someone calling the post attacking straw men, but I think that comment tree is worth rereading fully. Basically, this is what a worldview feels like from the inside- of course every sane person sees things this way, how could they not? But other people do sometimes have radically different worldviews, and sometimes they are radically confused about things.
Have you read EY's more recent post on reductionism (which may be clearer after reading the preceding posts)? I'm curious if that would help clarify where precisely you disagree.
Well, if the definition said that "reductionists disagree that 2 & 2 make 5" I wouldn't disagree with that either. What worries me is the apparent refusal to engage with the rational critics of reductionism. But I am mainly thinking of critics in fields other than physics - politics "there is no such thing as society", Skinner's psychology, "there are no thoughts, only stimuli and responses", not to mention developmental biology, weather forecasting & even mechanical engineering analysis, none of which actually get near "the territory" of quarks and leptons. So I am beginning to suspect that reductionism is used in a special sense by EY, more or less as a synonym for monism. And it's true, I wouldn't want to defend "substance dualists".
As for the Naval Gunner, the point is that he would be right in other fields than fundamental physics. In weather forecasting long term forecasts using coarser models are actually more accurate than those using fine meshes, because of the chaotic behaviour at smaller scales. So I would say the gunner was just misinformed! The fact that one of the two theories happens to be one of the very few theories that are exact as far as we currently know, and the other an approximation, makes it a special case - though possibly one of special relevance if monism/dualism is really the issue in question.
Thanks for pointing to the more recent EY post, which I look forward to reading. No time tonight.
What you are calling reductionism here is the refusal to countenance some higher-level properties. But, in fact, most reductionists do countenance most h-l properties. What makes them reductionists (which of course is not brought out by the broken LW wiki definition) is that they think all the h-l properties they countenance can be explained at a lower level. BTW, people who don't countenance any h-l properties, states, or entities are called mereological nihiists, not reductionists.
I don't quite agree here. It's true that chaotic interactions and floating point multiplication errors mean that long-running fine-grained maps are less accurate than long-running coarse-grained maps, but it seems cleaner to consider that a fact about computer science, not meteorology.
I would actually recommend Hands vs. Fingers first if you haven't read it yet. It's shorter and may be more directly relevant to your interests.
Re Hands vs. Fingers. What worries me about this is the lack of any attention to the different contexts/purposes of different statements about hands & fingers. I have added a comment to the original post to amplify this.
Thanks again.
I'd call it a fact about any system whose trajectories diverge at a smaller scale and converge at a larger scale (roughly), but that's a radical view that needs a new discussion some time.
I think I can see a useful way of taking the reductionism question further, but will do more reading first...
I mentioned back in April that the point about chaos and computer science needed a proper discussion. It is here.
I also mentioned another way of taking the reductionism question further. I was referring to this.
Re my claim:
On reflection I suspect the disagreement here is that I am doubting that Bryan could consciously deny this, and you & EY & others are suspecting that he is unconsciously denying it. Well, that's a theory. I have added an edit to my post recognizing this. This seems to boil down to the LW-wiki "definition" not really defining what reductionists believe, but rather defining why they believe certain criticisms of reductionism are wrong. That at least would explain why it sounds biased!
To answer more fully: The 'monist' model without information as a category describes reality at any instant but does not describe what is conserved from one instant to the next. Any activity that requires an intelligible account of what is going on is easier with the concept of information as a separate "thing". Of course, information doesn't belong in a nonphysical universe, since it obeys physical laws. Nevertheless the fact that it has a life of its own, with laws distinct to the laws specific to the materials which embody it an any given time, give it part (but not all) of the character of a separate physical but intangible substance.
The point of my analogy was to emphasise that all categories are man-made, including "substance", so that "substance counting" has an element of arbitrariness. Actually I don't find that treating "mind" as a separate substance is helpful!
If you mean infromation, it is not clear that that is conserved. And I don't see how a sufficiently detailed description of reality at the quark level could fail to describe all the information.
OK, not strictly "conserved", except that I understand quantum mechanics requires that the information in the universe must be conserved. But what I meant is that if you download a file to a different medium and then delete the original, the information is still the same although the descriptions at quark level are utterly different. Thus there is a sense in which a quark level description of reality fails to capture an important fact about it (the identity of the two files in information terms).
I don't think this has anything to do with dualism in the Cartesian sense, it's just an example of my general preference for not taking metaphysical positions without reference to the context. I'm afraid I don't know the label for that!
..absent collapse..
But a 4D descriptions of al the changes involved in the copy-and-delete process would be sufficient to show that the information in the first medium is equivalent to the information in the second. In fact, your problem would be false positives, since determinism will always show that subsequent state contains the same information as a previous one.
Ah, is that so.
Yes, I can see that that's one way of looking at it.
I don't think so, since the information I would be comparing in this case (the "file contents") would be just a reduction of the information in two regions of space-time.
And under determinsim, all the information in any spatial slice will be reproduced throughout time. Hence the false positives.
I'm not clear what you are meaning by "spatial slice". That sounds like all of space at a particular moment in time. In speaking of a space-time region I am speaking of a small amount of space (e.g. that occupied by one file on a hard drive) at a particular moment in time.
Actually, it's a trialist model, or worse. Something or someone had to create and program the computers and push the start button.
;) ... but that's still only matter and information, just that we're now just information....
Dualists are not necessarily emergentists.
Emergentists typically view emergent higher level properties as unpredictable from the smallest constituents of a system and some minimal set of their relations. Which is more or less to say that the h-l property contains more information than its base. So there is little evidence that emergentists are engaging in map-territory confusion, or trying to reify simple h-l properties.