There are no magical essences, but there are many unexplained things. I’ll go so far as to claim that if you have really internalized LW’s reductionism lessons, you should be seeing mysteries everywhere you look!
It is one thing to say “duh, this thing is built out of these tiny blocks”. Feynman gives an example in his lectures (I have no idea if it’s still true today, or if it just reflects Feynman’s state of knowledge about physics): all attempts to derive ferromagnetism from the behavior of individual atoms, at the time Feynman was writing his lectures, gave the result with the wrong sign. Can you believe that? All physicists at the time assumed that the complexity of the situation—lots of tiny spinning charges interacting—should somehow make the correct sign emerge, if you “do all the calculations right”. Now does this remind us of anything, hmm.
It’s easy to note that something can in principle be built out of smaller building blocks, but much harder to explain how it was built. Do actual work, figure out the mechanism, like I tried to do in reducing “could”.
For example, do we really know anything about “personal identity” in the presence of copies? Can we build “personal identity”? Given a computer program that runs multiple copies of a person, can we make correct statements about the “subjective anticipation” of these copies? Which forms of anthropic reasoning work, and which don’t? Does the doomsday argument work? Many people hold strong opinions, but there doesn’t seem to be any definitively correct solution.
All the other examples on your list have the same problem. We cannot reduce mathematics—we don’t even know what a natural number is! (Which means we can’t teach it to a computer.) Reducing pain qualia—or “intelligence”, say—is likely correspondingly harder.
Edit: made tone less confrontational. Apologies if you read my comment before that.
all attempts to derive ferromagnetism from the behavior of individual atoms, at the time Feynman was writing his lectures, gave the result with the wrong sign.
There are no magical essences, but there are many unexplained things. I’ll go so far as to claim that if you have really internalized LW’s reductionism lessons, you should be seeing mysteries everywhere you look!
It is one thing to say “duh, this thing is built out of these tiny blocks”. Feynman gives an example in his lectures (I have no idea if it’s still true today, or if it just reflects Feynman’s state of knowledge about physics): all attempts to derive ferromagnetism from the behavior of individual atoms, at the time Feynman was writing his lectures, gave the result with the wrong sign. Can you believe that? All physicists at the time assumed that the complexity of the situation—lots of tiny spinning charges interacting—should somehow make the correct sign emerge, if you “do all the calculations right”. Now does this remind us of anything, hmm.
It’s easy to note that something can in principle be built out of smaller building blocks, but much harder to explain how it was built. Do actual work, figure out the mechanism, like I tried to do in reducing “could”.
For example, do we really know anything about “personal identity” in the presence of copies? Can we build “personal identity”? Given a computer program that runs multiple copies of a person, can we make correct statements about the “subjective anticipation” of these copies? Which forms of anthropic reasoning work, and which don’t? Does the doomsday argument work? Many people hold strong opinions, but there doesn’t seem to be any definitively correct solution.
All the other examples on your list have the same problem. We cannot reduce mathematics—we don’t even know what a natural number is! (Which means we can’t teach it to a computer.) Reducing pain qualia—or “intelligence”, say—is likely correspondingly harder.
Edit: made tone less confrontational. Apologies if you read my comment before that.
The reference is volume II, chapter 37 “Magnetic Materials,” section 1.
Does anyone know about this? Has this been resolved?