Comment author: TheAncientGeek 27 April 2014 08:18:38PM *  3 points [-]

Scientists have argued .for independent higher level laws.

You have tried to argue that supernaturalism fails to answer any question by extrapolation from one example, where naturalism does well. The supernaturalist could likewise cherry-pick examples.

Comment author: Shane_Patt 27 April 2014 08:26:29PM *  0 points [-]

Examples where supernaturalism is methodologically successful? I would love to hear some!

(Not being sarcastic here; I really would.)

In response to Tapestries of Gold
Comment author: TheAncientGeek 27 April 2014 10:49:17AM 3 points [-]

Adopting naturalism leaves a lot of questions unanswered; likewise adopting reductionism. One issue you haven't touched on is whether there is always a reductive relation between causal relations on different levels, or whether there can be independent laws at difference levels.

Comment author: Shane_Patt 27 April 2014 07:55:02PM 0 points [-]

Adopting naturalism leaves a lot of questions unanswered

Yes, it absolutely does; but then supernaturalism, even if granted, fails to actually answer them. It's the difference between saying "Here are Maxwell's Equations, which tells the angels where to push the electrons" or just, "Here are Maxwell's Equations." (Of course, the other option—having only the angels and not Maxwell's laws—is obsolete; it would make an electronic device a miracle, and each other electronic device a separate and additional miracle.)

whether there can be independent laws at different levels

I would say that the history of science is a history of what seemed like contingent equalities turning out to have been necessary identities all along; that is the character of the Law, as far as we have grasped it.

In response to Tapestries of Gold
Comment author: ShardPhoenix 27 April 2014 09:37:36AM 10 points [-]

Isn't there still an asymmetry, in that all brains are made of atoms, but few atoms are part of brains, etc? Basically in some sense the higher levels are more rare and fragile than the lower levels.

Comment author: Shane_Patt 27 April 2014 07:41:45PM *  3 points [-]

That's true, and not something I thought of, since I was focused on ontological rather than statistical asymmetries. Of course, it could turn out to be a temporary condition, once Foomy starts converting its future light-cone to computronium! Also, although most of the bottom levels fail to generate interesting (knowledge-containing) structures, such structures on the higher levels might have the property that—because they squeeze the future—they tend to become present across whole swathes of Everett branches, making them in a full-multiversal sense actually less fragile.

Interesting corollary: one or more levels above morality, in which most moral agents are nonparticipants. I'm not sure where to go with that, so I'm going to just stroke my beard and say "Hmmm" in a wise-sounding way.

In response to Tapestries of Gold
Comment author: Prankster 27 April 2014 11:26:10AM 3 points [-]

I really like the imagery in your explanation, but I am not entirely clear on what the golden threads symbolize here. Would it be fair to say that the golden threads are the explanations of how a law or model on a lower level of abstraction causes the observations on a higher level?

Also, I don't really think you could deduce the entire structure of the blue line given by any one point as you seem to imply.

If you are given the physics of a universe, there might be several possible types of physiology, and for every such physiology there might be several different types of neural circuitry. Similarly you could say that there are still some degrees of freedom left over when some arbitrary psychology is given; it might be possible to have human-like cognition within the framework of purely newtonian physics, or we might be able to have a mind with the same morality but vastly different circuitry.

Of course you gain information about the entire blue line when you are given a single point, but it does not seem sufficient for crafting a complete model to know a lot about, say, the moral values of humans or the mental states of earthworms.

Comment author: Shane_Patt 27 April 2014 07:33:47PM 2 points [-]

golden threads are the explanations of how a law or model on a lower level of abstraction causes the observations on a higher level

That's a good way of putting it, except that it would be "explains" rather than "causes." I definitely should make it more clear that—because there are actually many more columns than shown in the diagram—a golden thread connects an entire row to the entire row above it, not just one point to one point.

don't really think you could deduce the entire structure of the blue line given by any one point

I wasn't clear there; please see my reply to shminux, who had the same objection.

In response to Tapestries of Gold
Comment author: shminux 27 April 2014 05:55:48PM 3 points [-]

Your post is an illuminating attempt to explicate some usually implicit concepts.

I sort of agree with your first diagram, that it is only human thinking that overlays a direction, or any kind of linkage, on the human-made collection of abstractions. But you lose me after that.

David Deutsch convinced me that even this was a mistake. A mind of arbitrary power, given only the bottom row, could deduce all the others—granted.

This is a highly contentious speculation (Deutsch, like Penrose, is fond of them), and I am not aware of any experimental evidence for it, so I refuse to grant it until I see some. Well, I suppose there is a tiny bit of it, where advances in physics let people design new chemical processes, or when understanding biology better lets us predict some behavior patterns.

I am far more comfortable with the more pedestrian definition of reductionism, where the arrows of human analysis of these abstractions point downward, and the secondary arrows of synthesis point upward, together forming "explanations", and, if we are lucky, testable predictions, when your secondary upward arrows lead to something not yet observed.

I don't understand your description of the "causation" meta-abstraction. "Meta" because it seems to connect towers of abstractions together somehow. One hint is that you describe it by "how" instead of "what", and, if I cut through your gratuitous use of pathos and evocative imagery, you seem to say that both abstraction towers and meta-abstraction connections between the abstraction towers are required for robust knowledge.

Furthermore, you seem to describe the breaks in your [what x how] mental framework as supernaturalism, which makes sense in the context, I suppose.

In response to comment by shminux on Tapestries of Gold
Comment author: Shane_Patt 27 April 2014 07:29:46PM 1 point [-]

This is a highly contentious speculation

Hmm, I see I wasn't clear there at all. That all levels can be deduced from one level is just what Deutsch himself isn't granting—he argues against it! Rather, it (or something like it) is the explanation I usually see people give for why they label the bottom of the blue line as more "fundamental"; my intention was to point out with the next sentence that the complete-deducibility hypothesis doesn't make the blue line directional even if true, because it would allow travel along the line in both directions. I definitely need to rewrite that part. (All that being said, I do think that advances in physics letting people design new chemical processes, and that sort of thing, are strong evidence that far more is possible; I find the hypothesis more plausible than you and Deutsch do.)

together forming "explanations"

It's true the directions of my green arrows are debatable; the reason I went with upward was because the simplest way I could think of to formulate what was happening was just "X explains Y"—"many compounds explain synapse." I agree that in a more zoomed-in view each green arrow would imply a complex up-and-down motion of analysis and synthesis.

it seems to connect towers of abstractions together somehow

Violet lines of causation connect blue lines of territory to each other, not green towers of map. Green towers are connected by red threads, which are (causal) explanation, not causation. I thought this was clear by analogy with the first two diagrams, but you're not the only one, so it looks like I should make it more explicit.

gratuitous use of pathos and evocative imagery

It's a fair cop! But I like it that way. ^_^

Tapestries of Gold

24 Shane_Patt 27 April 2014 07:23AM

(Nothing here is actually new, but a short explanation with pictures would have been helpful to me a while ago, so I thought I'd make an attempt.)

Let me start with a patch of territory: a set of things that exist. The number of rows is far from clear, but I'll use six candidates as a sample; and of course the diagram ought to be a tree, with many elements on each row converging to fewer on the row above, but you'll have to imagine that part.



The blue line that runs through the column is not causation, but identity. It took me a long time (and many knocks about the head from smarter people) to realize that this line is directionless. If someone labels the top Meaningful and the bottom Meaningless, or the top Important and the bottom Unimportant, we see this at once for an error; but the same labels are still errors, if applied in the opposite order. If someone labels the top Contingent and the bottom Necessary, this is another error; if the top Subjective and the bottom Objective, another; or if the top Less Real and the bottom More Real, another still. (Some errors of this type have been called "reductionism," but they aren't the thing people mean when they say "reductionism" around here.) Whatever is, is real—and equally so, wherever it appears along the blue line.

At one time I would have labelled the top Emergent and the bottom Fundamental, but David Deutsch convinced me that even this was a mistake. Suppose we grant that a mind of arbitrary power, given only the bottom row, could deduce all the others—a popular hypothesis for which we have some good evidence (though not too much). Even then: could not this same mind, given only the complete row for Physiology, deduce the contents of Chemistry no less readily? The blue line has no direction; if I forget this I forget what identity means, and cast myself into confusion—the same type of confusion afflicting one who says, "Science believes that morality's not real!" Better, then, to unlabel the blue line entirely, and when someone wants to know what ontological difference exists between the higher rows and the lower, say "Mu." (Until I realized this I did not understand the metaethics sequence—but that isn't the topic of this post.)

Where does that leave reductionism? Right where it was, untouched. As finite entities, we never perceive the blue line as a whole—not a single azure band of the infinite expanse in which we live. We have to divide the line into graspable segments, and therefore must explain how each segment connects to the others; we must spin the green threads of explanation, drawing a map to overlay the territory. (The diagram is simplified here as well; a green thread is not as simple as "compounds explain synapse," but an intricate dance of analysis and synthesis.) In dividing the line we introduce relation between its divisions, and in introducing relation we introduce direction; emergence is a feature of maps, not of territories. (I would not say "The mind emerges from the brain," but "The active brain is the mind, and models of the mind emerge from models of the brain.") Reductionism proper is just this: noticing that green arrows are always present, and always point up. The whole is never more, nor less, than the sum of its parts; it only seems that way, if some parts have escaped our notice.



Now let's add a few more columns; again, we'll simplify the structure so we can see it, leaving out all worlds but one.



The violet lines are causation—how things are; together with the blue of what things are, they form indigo Reality: the World That Is. (Maybe the violet lines too have no direction; this sounds like timeless physics, of which I don't feel I can wisely speak.) In any case, they extend far beyond our reach, as each effect in turn becomes a cause; once again we find ourselves dividing the lines into portions we can grasp, and to restore the continuity we once removed, we spin threads of red. These too are explanations—though of another kind than the green. Just as violet lines connect blue lines to form a complete territory, red threads connect strands of green threads to form a complete map.



There are traps to fall into here, too. If we believed that the only violet lines (or the only red threads) that counted as real or meaningful were the ones on the bottom row, we would commit another error; this error also has been called "reductionism"—small wonder that it's sometimes deployed as a term of abuse! Or—because we are fallible and the true multiply-branching structure is hard to perceive—we might draw a red arrow pointing left, and be guilty of mere illogic.

But if we can braid red and green together, our best strength is here—in threads of gold. Only a golden thread is knowledge made whole, and no golden thread is ever spun but of green and red in harmony; until I know what a thing is and how it comes to be, both, I do not understand that thing.



If you're wondering about the empty space beneath, remember that the number of rows in the true structure is far above six; I suspect it is infinite. The number of columns is far higher than shown as well, so a golden thread connects, not a single point to a single point, but a wide expanse of one row to a wide expanse of the row above it. Golden threads are far-reaching theories and models—spun of many smaller explanations.

Often, those who find their cloth too threadbare for their taste will turn to another source of material: the beige threads of supernaturalism. Beige looks a bit like gold, if not examined too closely, and these threads have one great advantage: to spin them is the easiest thing in the world. Since they're unanchored to reality, you're free to craft them in any length or shape you like, lay them with arrows pointing wherever suits you, and even cover threads of red or green or gold whose lustre seems displeasing. Some have been taught to weave with beige alone, and in years of toil wrought patterns of strange and desolate beauty; but every hour of labour made their work, not more akin to fact, but less.



In spinning green and red, and in braiding them as gold, we become scientists; in cutting loose the snarls of beige, we become naturalists; in weaving our many threads into sturdy cloth, we become rationalists. Then we join our separate cloths as one, and in such tapestries—if all goes well—we glimpse truth: the harmony of indigo and gold.

Comment author: drethelin 23 April 2014 03:26:53AM 1 point [-]

this is silly. Good is a quite useful concept that easily stretches to cover entities with different preferences, but even if it does not, it's STILL meaningful, and your clippy example shows us exactly why. The meaning of clipful, something like "causes there to be more paperclips" or whatever, is perfectly clear to if not really valued by humankind.

Comment author: Shane_Patt 23 April 2014 05:49:43AM 0 points [-]

Ah, I see I was unclear. By "is no more to a Tyvar" I meant "is no more significant to a Tyvar" rather than "is no more comprehensible to a Tyvar." Sorry; my fault.

Comment author: [deleted] 22 April 2014 01:27:02AM *  1 point [-]

I don't really know anything about the Tyvar of Arlos, so I'm pretty confused on this front, but I'm fairly sure you're relating a Talmudic anecdote, not a Zen one ;-). "Forbidden, permissible, laudable, or obligatory" says to me that we're contemplating halachah.

In response to comment by [deleted] on Open thread, 21-27 April 2014
Comment author: Shane_Patt 22 April 2014 10:32:33AM 3 points [-]

I would hope you don't know anything about them—they were made up on the spot. ^_^

And yes, I suppose the style here might well have been influenced from more than one place.

Comment author: shminux 21 April 2014 11:33:28PM *  1 point [-]

How is this a failure of imagination? Why is the question parochial?

Comment author: Shane_Patt 22 April 2014 10:29:36AM 0 points [-]

Parochial because he mistook a local property of mindspace for a global one; unimaginative because he never thought of frumfulness when considering what things a mind might value. "Good" is no more to a Tyvar than "frumful" to Clippy or "clipful" to a human.

Comment author: Shane_Patt 21 April 2014 09:21:27PM 5 points [-]

A koan:

A monk came to Master Banzen and asked, "What can be said of universal moral law?"

Master Banzen replied, "Among the Tyvari of Arlos, all know that borlitude is highly frumful. For a Human of Earth, is quambling borl forbidden, permissible, laudable or obligatory?"

The monk replied, "Mu."

Master Banzen continued, "Among the Humans of Earth, all know that friendship is highly good. For a Tyvar of Arlos, is making friends forbidden, permissible, laudable or obligatory?"

The monk replied, "Mu," and asked no more.

Qi's Commentary: The monk's failure was one of imagination. His question was not foolish, but it was parochial.

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