Edit: I dug through OP's post history and found this thread. The thread gives better context to what /u/reguru is trying to say.

A tip: very little is gained by couching your ideas in this self-aggrandizing, condescending tone. Your over-reliance on second person is also an annoying tic, though some make it work. You don't, however.

You come off as very arrogant and immature, and very few people will bother wading through this. The few that will do it only in hopes of correcting you.

If you're at all interested in improving the quality of your writing, consider, at the very least, reading a few other top level, highly upvoted posts. They do not have these problems, and you'd be served by emulating them.

Reality is arational. Everything you do is arational.

"Reality is arational." is an easily defensible position, though it would take some work to make an idea worth entertaining out of it.

"Everything you do is arational." is flatly solipsistic and useless. You must agree that words have meaning, if only subjunctively, by your usage of them. 'Rational' means something, and it describes behavior. Behavior is goal-directed, and be judged by how well it achieves those goals. That is what bare rationalism is. If you disagree with this, you'll need better justifications.

You aren't aware of it because you lack awareness. By becoming aware that you are unaware, you have increased your awareness.

Contradiction can be used for effect, but always err on the side of 'don't do it'. You're work is better served rigorous than poetic.

Yet still, you will always lack awareness. ... My definition of awareness is the subjective experience of separating thoughts from awareness. You can become aware of thoughts, and if an "I" thought appears, that was not you, you simply became aware of it.

Y'know, despite myself, I found this passage genuinely pleasing on a aesthetic level. It's a mess of negation and recursion and strange loops that I can only compare to the bizarre logic of time travel, or perhaps the descriptive amalgams of cosmic horror. This is not a compliment.

You seem to be equating awareness with at least four different things, three if that was supposed to be a recursive definition.

1) awareness as total self-knowledge ("you will always lack awareness") Since this is pure armchair speculation anyway, I'm sure the mere existence of quines makes "You will never reach total awareness" false as a theorectical proposition.

2) awareness as consciousness/the self ("separating thoughts from awareness")

3) awareness as noticing something ("You can become aware of thoughts,")

4) your own definition

My point is that I think that you, confuse the map for the territory. Now I made the same mistake, because "map not being the territory" is a map. In all actuality, all types of communication are, and equally untrue.

Solipsistic and useless.

The way I see it is that reality is the way it is and it is arational. Gravity does not exist. We may create a layer on top of arational reality and call it reality, while in all actuality it is a virtual reality.

Useless and solipsistic.

It is simply a human projection on top of the arational reality. Arationality is completely independent of reasoning, everything rational and irrational exists within a matrix (virtual reality) of the arational.

Do I need to say it?

It's fine to do physics, math or other science but it is still a human projection.

I think this is false. Mathematics is interesting precisely because of its non-humanity. The joy of doing mathematics is incommensurate with an imagination of the joy of doing mathematics. The missing ingredient, of course, is the unknown, of discovering something outside yourself.

To call it a human projection is to miss the entire point of preforming these actions in the first place, which is curiosity, exploring the unknown.

You might think that there is no alternative to using maps (like I do here) but I am simply pointing out that you can discover arational reality without creating another map to point out its existence.

The "map/territory" dichotomy is just another map, as you yourself said. In reality, there is only atoms and the void. Self/other, subject/object are all a part of reality itself, and the delineation is only useful, never necessary.

If you want to find out for yourself, what happens when you become silent of all thoughts? Does reality disappear?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_(psychology)

The point is that you can sit down, become aware of all the maps

you cannot

Because it is an illusion. The illusion that some maps are better than others when they are all the same from the perspective of the arational.

The arational has no perspective, because it is not the type of thing to have perspectives. Reality has no mind, no agency.

Reality is, however, patterned and models exploit this patterning.

Suppose one person (call her Alice) choose to act as if there exists models better than other models, while another person (call him Bob) chooses to not do this. One may object to using words like 'true' or 'accurate' to describe their approaches, but there is a certain quality the former would have that the latter does not. The former may make a habit ingesting certain objects, or preforming pointless tasks for useless trinkets. The other would object that 'hunger' and 'money' are just models and no model is better than another.

These approaches lead to certain outcomes. Again, one might not like describing one as 'true' and the other as 'false', but there is a certain pattern there to be found there.

What's the point of this post? It's an invitation, you have to figure it out yourself.

While I'm sure there are many people here who enjoy puzzles, obscurantism is frowned upon.

The social contract of lesswrong is the opposite of your epigram: "What's the point of this post?" You have to figure that out on your own. It's not our job, but yours. I don't doubt you have some insight here. I'm sure it could even be couched into a post fit for this community. But you have to do the job of filtering your thoughts, crafting your posts and hoping against hope you didn't make an embarrassing mistake.

Finally, I apologize for combative tone of this post. This was written out of sympathy rather than disgust or disrespect. (at the very least, notice if being offensive was my aim, I could have done a better job of it)

...the other reductionism I mentioned, the 'big thing = small thing + small thing' one...

There the open question of what + means.

I've added most of this comment to the OP so future readers know my revised opinion on the accuracy of this post.

To me your post didn't feel inaccurate but confused. A mix of saying trival things and throwing around terms where I don't know exactly what you mean and I'm not sure whether you have thought about what you mean exactly either.

Good predictive explanation will almost always be reductionist, because, as it says on the tin, big are made of smaller things.

Cognitive psychologists generally make better predicitons about human behavior than neuroscientists. Here it seems to me like you think about philosophy as distinct from empirical reality. I get the impression that you try to understand reductionism without seeing how it's actually applied and not applied in reality.

You can also make great predicions on believes that the function of the heart is pumping blood even if there are no "function-atoms" around.

Mary's representation of reality is presumed complete ex hypothesi, therefore she will understand exactly what will happen in her brain after seeing color, and that is exactly what happens

Mary is presumed to have all objective knowedge and only objectve knowledge, Your phrasing is ambiguous and therefire doesnt address the point. When you say Mary will know what happens when she sees red, do you mean she knows how red looks subjectively, or she knows something objective like what her behaviour will be.....further on you mention predicting her reactions,

You wouldn't call a statement of PA that isn't a literally a Gödel encoding of a statement (for some fixed encoding) a non-mathematical statement. For one, because that statement has a Gödel encoding by necessity. But more importantly, even though the statement technically isn't literally a Gödel-encoding, it's still mathematical, regardless.

Is that supposed to relate to the objective/ subjective distinction somehow?

[Mary knows] how she will respond to learning what red is like. Mary knows how others will respond. This exhausts the space of possible predictions that could be made on behalf of this subjective knowledge, and it can be done without

So? The overall point is about physicalism, and to get to 'physicalism is false', all you need is the existence of subjective knowledge, not its usefulness in making prediction. So again I don't see the relevance

Suppose Mary has enough information to predict her own behavior. Suppose she predicts she will do x. Could she not, upon deducing that fact, decide to not do x?

Maybe. I don't see the problem. There is still an unproblematic sense in which Mary has all objective knowledge, even if it doesn't allow her to do certain things. If that was the point.

If one of Mary's predictions is, "When I see red, I will say, 'wow! I didn't know that red looked like that!", then the fact that she has predicted this in advance is hardly evidence that she does not learn anything by seeing red. If anything, it proves that she does.

Whose idea of reductionism are you criticising? I think your post could get more useful by being more clear about the idea you want to challenge.

I also get the feeling that use bailey in a context where motte would be the right word.

Apart from that I don't know what you mean with theory in "Reductionism is a philosophy, not a theory." As a result on using a bunch of terms where I don't know exactly what you mean it's hard to follow your argument.

This can be illustrated by the example of evolution I mentioned: An evolutionary explanation is actually anti-reductionist; it explains the placement of nucleotides in terms of mathematics like inclusive genetic fitness and complexities like population ecology.

This doesn't acknowledge the other things explained on the same grounds. It's a good argument if the principles were invented for the single case you're explaining, but here they're universal. If you want to include inclusive genetic fitness in the complexity of the explanation, I think you need to include everything it's used for in the complexity of what's being explained.

Thank you. I took them off.

How do I add them properly?

I just explained the position I am holding.

"I think you're wrong" is not a position

I have explained elsewhere why the loophole doesnt work:-

M's R is about what it says its about, the existence of non physical facts. Finding a loophole where Mary can instantiate the brain state without having the perceptual stimulus doesn't address that...indeed it assumes that an instantiation of the red-seeing is necessary, which is tantamount to conceding that something subectve is going on, which is tantamount to conceding the point

Moving on to your argument:-

I think the distinction between 'knowing all about' and 'seeing' red is captured in my box analogy. The brain state is a box. There is another box inside it, call this 'understanding'. We call something inside the first box 'experienced'. So the paradox hear is the two distinct states [experiencing (red) ] and [experiencing ( [understanding (red) ] ) ] are both brought under the header [knowing (red)], and this is really confusing

Confusing to whom?

Let's suppose that person is Frank Jackson.

In the knowledge Argument, Jackson credits Mary with all objective knowledge, and only objective knowledge precisely because he is trying to establish the existence of subjective knowledge .. what Mary doesnt know must be subjective, if there is something Mary doesn't know. So the eventual point s that there s more to knowledge than objective knowledge.

So you don't show that Jackson is wrong by agreeing with him.

But I don't know that you think Jackson is wrong,

A lossless explanation is reductionist

Isn't that what people mean when they say reductionism is right?

All models are wrong, some models are useful.

Reductionism is wrong only in cases where it doesn't reduce far enough, or when computation limits one's ability to work the very large number of factors that make up our macro experiences. For these reasons, some amount of higher-level modeling is needed, to gloss over the underlying math.

This does NOT mean that the big thing is anything other than the sum of small things. It just means there are too many small things to compute over, so it's easier, and gives good-enough results to treat them as a big thing.

Your examples are not of reductionist failing, but of a poor choice of modeling level. Evolutionary explanations that include inclusive genetic fitness and population ecology is already non-reductionist explanation. Evolutionary explanations that start with individual cell biology, random combination and mutation, and 10^15 or so specific deaths are probably reductionist enough for most purposes.