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.
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!
At this point it is important to distinguish “Mind theory” from other fields where Reductionism is debated. In this field, Reductionists apparently regard Emergentism as a form of disguised Vitalism/Dualism - if emergent properties can’t be explained by the physical ingredients, they must exist in some non-physical realm.
Standard philosophical emergentism is explicitly a form of dualism..
"As a theory of mind (which it is not always), emergentism differs from idealism, eliminative materialism, identity theories, neutral monism, panpsychism, and substance dualism, whilst being closely associated with property dualism. " (WP)
..but standard emergentism has a clause that rogerS omits: emergent properties aren't just higher-level properties not had by their consitutents, they are higher-level properties which cannot be explanatorily reduced to their constituents.
However, Emergentism can apply equally well to everything from chess playing programs to gearbox vibrations, neither of which involve anything like mysterious spiritual substances, so this can hardly be the whole story.
"Emergentism" can only be applied to gearboxes if the irreducbility clause is dropped. The high-level behaviour of a mechanism is always reducible to its the behaviour of its parts, because a mechanism is built up out of parts, and reduction is therefore, literally, reverse engineering.
But being able to offer an uncontentious definition of emergentism does not prove there is nothing contentious about it. It's a kind of inverted straw man.
"Emergentism" can only be applied to gearboxes if the irreducibility clause is dropped. The high-level behaviour of a mechanism is always reducible to its the behaviour of its parts.
My point is that depends if by "behaviour" you mean "the characteristics of a single solution" or "the characteristics of solution space". In the latter case the meaning of "reduction" doesn't seem unambiguous to me.
The practical debate I have in mind is whether multibody dynamics can answer practical questions about the behaviour of gearboxes under conditions of stochastic or transient excitation with backlash taken into account, the point being that the solution space in such an application can be very large.
The problem with the label "emergence" isn't that the phenomena does not occur. The problem is when people use the label "emergence" as a semantic stop sign, ending attempts at further explanation.
Airplanes flying through the air are an emergent property of quantum mechanics. That sentence standing alone tells you nothing useful about airplanes or quantum mechanics.
Also, discussion posts don't use Markdown. (I think they use HTML, but don't quote me).
The problem is when people use the label "emergence" as a semantic stop sign
Agreed, which is why I was trying to replace it by a "proceed with caution" sign with some specific directions.
One lives & learns - thanks.
The boundary between physical causality and logical or mathematical implication doesn’t always seem to be clearcut. Take two examples.
(1) The product of two and an integer is an even integer. So if I double an integer I will find that the result is even. The first statement is clearly a timeless mathematical implication. But by recasting the equation as a procedure I introduce both an implied separation in time between action and outcome, and an implied physical embodiment that could be subject to error or interruption. Thus the truth of the second formulation strictly depends on both a mathematical fact and physical facts.
(2) The endpoint of a physical process is causally related to the initial conditions by the physical laws governing the process. The sensitivity of the endpoint to the initial conditions is a quite separate physical fact, but requires no new physical laws: it is a mathematical implication of the physical laws already noted. Again, the relationship depends on both physical and mathematical truths.
Is there a recognized name for such hybrid cases? They could perhaps be described as “quasi-causal” relationships.
EG: an ancestral hunter-gatherer tribal group; a group of castaways on an island, the remainder being young children; an encounter with aliens; in a group defending ones family against an evil oppressor; etc. etc. Likewise, imagine being in the shoes of somebody with very different aptitudes and personality. The things that remain constant - the things that tell us how to deal with all these different cases - are our terminal values. (Or rather, they would be if we could only eliminate self-deception.)
Excellent suggestion.
I would like to add "Nazi"to that list, and note that if you imagine doing something other than the historical results (in those cases where we know the historical result) you're doing this wrong.
EDIT: reading this over, it sounds kinda sarcastic. Just want to clarify I'm being sincere here.
Yes indeed, it is a challenge to understand how the same human moral functionality "F" can result in a very different value system "M" to ones own, though I suspect a lot of historical reading would be necessary to fully understand the Nazi's construction of the social world - "S", in my shorthand. A contemporary example of the same challenge is the cultures that practice female genital mutilation. You don't have to agree with a construction of the world to begin to see how it results in the avowed values that emerge from it, but you do have to be able to picture it properly. In both cases, this challenge has to be distinguished from the somewhat easier task of explaining the origins of the value system concerned.
Since then I've been looking around and it feels... feels like I've finally found my species after a lifetime among aliens. I have heartily agreed with everything I've seen Eliezer write (so far), which I suspect is almost as unusual to him as it is to me. It's simply relieving to see minds working properly.
Know that feeling. I wonder how common a reaction it is, actually ...
Maybe it's just that EY is very persuasive! I'm reminded of what was said about some other polymath (Arthur Koestler I think) that the critics were agreed that he was right on almost everything - except, of course, for the topic that the critic concerned was expert in, where he was completely wrong!
So my problem is, whether to just read the sequences, or to skim through all the responses as well. The latter takes an awful lot longer, but from what I've seen so far there's often a response from some expert in the field concerned that, at the least, puts the post into a whole different perspective.
Confidence in moral judgments is never a sound criterion for them being "terminal", it seems to me.
To see why, consider that ones working values are unavoidably a function of two related things: one's picture of oneself, and of the social world. Thus, confident judgments are likely to reflect confidence in relevant parts of these pictures, rather than the shape of the function. To take your example, your adverse judgement of authority could have been a reflection of a confident picture of your ideal self as not being submissive, and of human society at its current state of development as being capable of operating without authority (doubtless oversimplifying greatly, but I hope you get the idea).
A crude mathematical model may help. If M is a vector of your moral values, and S and I is your understanding of society and personal construct respectively, then I am suggesting M = F(S, I). Then the problem is that "terminal values" as I understand them reside in F, but it is only M that is directly accessible to introspection. It is extremely difficult to imagine away the effect of S and I, but one way of making progress should be to vary S & I. That is, try hard to imagine being in an utterly different social context to the one we know. EG: an ancestral hunter-gatherer tribal group; a group of castaways on an island, the remainder being young children; an encounter with aliens; in a group defending ones family against an evil oppressor; etc. etc. Likewise, imagine being in the shoes of somebody with very different aptitudes and personality. The things that remain constant - the things that tell us how to deal with all these different cases - are our terminal values. (Or rather, they would be if we could only eliminate self-deception.)
What made your characterization one of greedy reduction in my eyse was this
is best characterised as corresponding only to the lowest hierarchical level
Describe it at whatever level is most convenient. All levels are real to the extent that they model accurately.
I'm still puzzled, as you seem to be both defending and contradicting EY's view that:
the reductionist thesis is that we use multi-level models for computational reasons, but physical reality has only a single level. (Italics added).
I'm not actually attacking this view so much as regarding it as a particular convention or definition of reality rather than a "thesis".
Perhaps you are reading "best characterized as" as "best modelled as"? I'm not saying that, just that this is the sense of "reality" that EY/the wiki writer prefers to adopt.
The answer is in the rest of the sentence that you truncated!
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.
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.
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?
Re my claim:
"well, of course Bryan's mental model of his pain doesn't exist in reality by definition"
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!
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?
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!
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Standard philosophical emergentism is explicitly a form of dualism..
"As a theory of mind (which it is not always), emergentism differs from idealism, eliminative materialism, identity theories, neutral monism, panpsychism, and substance dualism, whilst being closely associated with property dualism. " (WP)
..but standard emergentism has a clause that rogerS omits: emergent properties aren't just higher-level properties not had by their consitutents, they are higher-level properties which cannot be explanatorily reduced to their constituents.
"Emergentism" can only be applied to gearboxes if the irreducbility clause is dropped. The high-level behaviour of a mechanism is always reducible to its the behaviour of its parts, because a mechanism is built up out of parts, and reduction is therefore, literally, reverse engineering.
But being able to offer an uncontentious definition of emergentism does not prove there is nothing contentious about it. It's a kind of inverted straw man.
As a theory exclusively of the mind, I can see that emergentism has implications like property dualism, but not as a theory that treats the brain just as a very complex system with similar issues to other complex systems.