How do you explain to people that reductionism = (reduce until you have good reason not to); am I even right to say that or is this a harmful oversimplification?
Understand Solomonoff induction and you will at least understand what constitutes good reason in theory.
I have spent a lot of time studying Solomonoff induction, Kolmogorov complexity, and the universal prior. But that doesn’t seem to lend itself to understanding why we’re allowed to think we have good reason to suspect that some aspect of reality is finally truly elementary. How can there possibly be evidence for such a claim? It’s one thing to say that, thus far, we cannot detect any substructure (in, say, an electron), but it’s quite another to then say, “well, it seems quantum amplitude must actually really be real then”
Various approaches to string theory indicate a limit to reductionism in the sense of looking for smaller and smaller parts: T-duality makes small distances in one string theory into large distances in an equivalent, dual theory. Matrix theory doesn’t even use space. The whole concept of “oscillating strings” is probably a naive and mathematically inefficient representation of the true physical content of the theory, though until we get something better, we can only limp along with the math and the concepts that we have. But already it looks like the beginning of the end.
Understand Solomonoff induction and you will at least understand what constitutes good reason in theory.
I have spent a lot of time studying Solomonoff induction, Kolmogorov complexity, and the universal prior. But that doesn’t seem to lend itself to understanding why we’re allowed to think we have good reason to suspect that some aspect of reality is finally truly elementary. How can there possibly be evidence for such a claim? It’s one thing to say that, thus far, we cannot detect any substructure (in, say, an electron), but it’s quite another to then say, “well, it seems quantum amplitude must actually really be real then”
Various approaches to string theory indicate a limit to reductionism in the sense of looking for smaller and smaller parts: T-duality makes small distances in one string theory into large distances in an equivalent, dual theory. Matrix theory doesn’t even use space. The whole concept of “oscillating strings” is probably a naive and mathematically inefficient representation of the true physical content of the theory, though until we get something better, we can only limp along with the math and the concepts that we have. But already it looks like the beginning of the end.