I can believe that quarks are ultimately responsible, but I’m not obligated to do so by a priori logical necessity.
I feel that someone should point out how difficult this discussion might be in light of the overwhelming empirical evidence for reductionism. Non-reductionist theories tend to get… reduced. In other words, reductionism’s logical status is a fairly fine distinction in practice.
That said, I wonder if the claim can’t be near-equivalently rephrased “it’s impossible to imagine a non-reductionist scenario without populating it with your own arbitrary fictions”. Your use of the term “conceivable” seems to mean (or include) something like “choose an arbitrary state space of possible worlds and an observation relation over that space”. Clearly anything goes.
You’re simply expanding your definition of “everything” to include arbitrary chunks of state space you bolted on, some of which are underdetermined by their interactions with every previous part of “everything”. I don’t have a fully fleshed-out logical theory of everything on hand, so I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt that what you’re saying isn’t logically invalid. Either way, it’s pointless. If there’s no link between levels, there’s no way to distinguish between states in the extended space except by some additional a priori process. Good luck acquiring or communicating evidence for such processes.
That said, I wonder if the claim can’t be near-equivalently rephrased “it’s impossible to imagine a non-reductionist scenario without populating it with your own arbitrary fictions”.
Ah, that’s very interesting. Now we’re getting somewhere.
I don’t think it has to be arbitrary. Couldn’t the following scenario be the case?:
The universe is full of entities that experiments show reducible to fundamental elements with laws (say, quarks), or entities that induction + parsimony tells us ought to be reducible to fundamental elements (since these entities are made of quarks, we just haven’t quite figured out the reduction of their emergent properties yet)… BUT there is one exception in this universe, a certain type of stuff whose behavior is quantifiable, yet not reducible to quarks. In fact, we have no reason to believe this certain type of stuff is even made of the fundamental stuff everything else seems to be. Every experiment would defy reducing this entity down to quarks, to the point that it would actually be against Occam’s Razor to try and reduce this entity to quarks! It would be a type of dualism, I suppose. It’s not a priori logically excluded, and it’s not arbitrary.
I think we might separate the ideas that there’s only one type of particle and that the world is reductionist. It is an open question as to whether everything can be reduced to a single fundamental thing (like strings) and it wouldn’t be a logical impossibility to discover that there were two or three kinds of things interacting. (Or would it?)
Reductionism, as I understand it, is the idea that the higher levels are completely explained by (are completely determined by) the lower levels. Any fundamentally new type of particle found would just be added to what we consider “lower level”.
So what does it say about the world that it is reductionist? I propose the following two things are being asserted:
(1) There’s no rule that operates at an intermediate level that doesn’t also operate on the lower levels. This means that you can’t start adding new rules when a certain level of organization is reached. For example, if you have a law that objects with mass behave a certain way, you can’t apply it to everything that has mass but not quarks. This is a consistency rule.
(2) Any rule that applies to an intermediate level is reducible to rules that can be expressed with and applied at the lower level. For example, we have the rule that two competing organisms cannot coexist in the same niche. Even though it would be very difficult to demonstrate, a reductionist worldview argues that in principle this rule can be derived from the rules we already apply to quarks.
When people argue about reductionism, they are usually arguing about (2). They have some idea that at a certain level of organization, new rules can come into play that simply aren’t expressible in the lower levels—they’re totally new rules.
Here’s a thought experiment about an apple that helped me sort through these ideas:
Suppose that I have two objects, one in my right hand and one in my left hand. The one in my left hand is an apple. The one in my right hand has exactly the same quarks in exactly the same states. But somehow, for some reason, they’re different. This implies that there is some degree of freedom between the lower level and the higher level. Now it follows that this free state is determined in some way; to determine an apple in my left hand and a non-apple in my right, either by some kind of rule or randomly, or both. In any case, we would observe this rule. Call it X. So the higher level, the object being an apple or non-apple, depends upon the lower levels and X.
(a) Was X there all along ? If so, X is part of the lower level and we just discovered it, we need to add it in to our lower level theory.
(b) What if X wasn’t “there” all along? What if for some reason, X only applies at intermediate levels? …either because
(i) X is inconsistently applied or because
(ii) X is not describable as a function of lower level terms
The case (a) doesn’t assert anything about the universe, it just illustrates a confusion that can result from not understanding what “lower level” means. I don’t think (b) in either part is logically impossible because you can run a simulation with these rules.
Until you require (and obviously you want to) that the universe is a closed system. Then I don’t think you can have b(i) or b(ii). A rule (Rule 1) that is inconsistently applied (bi) requires another rule (Rule 2) determining when to apply it. Rule 1 being inconsistent in a system means that Rule 2 is outside the system. If a phenomenon cannot be described by the states of the system (the lower level) (bii) then it depends on something else outside the system. So I think I’ve deduced that the logical impossibility of reductionism depends upon the universe being a closed system.
If the physical universe isn’t closed—if we allow the metaphysical—then non-reductionism is not logically impossible.
Where does randomness come in? Is the universe necessarily deterministic because of (bii) being impossible, so that the higher levels must depend deterministically on the lower levels? (I’m talking about whether a truly stochastic component is possible in Brownian motion or the creation of particles in a vacuum, etc).
Another thing to think about is how these ideas affect our theories about gravity. We have no direct evidence that gravity satisfies consistency or that it is expressible in terms of lowest level physics. Does anyone know if any well-considered theories are ever proposed for gravity that don’t satisfy these rules?
Reductionism, as I understand it, is the idea that the higher levels are completely explained by (are completely determined by) the lower levels. Any fundamentally new type of particle found would just be added to what we consider “lower level”.
Oh! Certainly. But this doesn’t seem to exclude “mind”, or some element thereof, from being irreducible—which is what Eliezer was trying to argue, right? He’s trying to support reductionism, and this seems to include an attack on “fundamentally mental” entities. Based on what you’re saying, though, there could be a fundamental type of particle, called “feelions,” or “qualions”—the entities responsible for what we call “mind”—which would not reduce down to quarks, and therefore would deserve to be called their own fundamental type of “stuff.” It’s a bit weird to me to call this a reductionist theory, and its certainly not a reductionist materialist theory.
Everything else you said seems to me right on—emergent properties that are irreducible to their constituents in principle seems somewhat incoherent to me.
its certainly not a reductionist materialist theory
In what way would these “feelions” or “qualions” not be materials? Your answer to this question may reveal some interesting hidden assumptions.
It’s a bit weird to me to call this a reductionist theory
Are you sure it’s weird because it’s not reductionist? Or because such a theory would never be seen outside of a metaphysical theory? So you automatically link the idea that minds are special because they have “qualions” with “metaphysical nonsense”.
But what if qualions really existed, in a material way and there were physical laws describing how they were caught and accumulated by neural cells. There’s absolutely no evidence for such a theory, so it’s crazy, but its not logically impossible or inconsistent with reductionism, right?
what if qualions really existed, in a material way and there were physical laws describing how they were caught and accumulated by neural cells. There’s absolutely no evidence for such a theory, so it’s crazy, but its not logically impossible or inconsistent with reductionism, right?
Hmm… excellent point. Here I do think it begins to get fuzzy… what if these qualions fundamentally did stuff that we typically attribute to higher-level functions, such as making decisions? Could there be a “self” qualion? Could their behavior be indeterministic in the sense that we naively attribute to humans? What if there were one qualion per person, which determined everything about their consciousness and personality irreducibly? I feel that, if these sorts of things were the case, we would no longer be within the realm of a “material” theory. It seems that Eliezer would agree:
By far the best definition I’ve ever heard of the supernatural is Richard Carrier’s: A “supernatural” explanation appeals to ontologically basic mental things, mental entities that cannot be reduced to nonmental entities. This is the difference, for example, between saying that water rolls downhill because it wants to be lower, and setting forth differential equations that claim to describe only motions, not desires. It’s the difference between saying that a tree puts forth leaves because of a tree spirit, versus examining plant biochemistry. Cognitive science takes the fight against supernaturalism into the realm of the mind. Why is this an excellent definition of the supernatural? I refer you to Richard Carrier for the full argument. But consider: Suppose that you discover what seems to be a spirit, inhabiting a tree: a dryad who can materialize outside or inside the tree, who speaks in English about the need to protect her tree, et cetera. And then suppose that we turn a microscope on this tree spirit, and she turns out to be made of parts—not inherently spiritual and ineffable parts, like fabric of desireness and cloth of belief; but rather the same sort of parts as quarks and electrons, parts whose behavior is defined in motions rather than minds. Wouldn’t the dryad immediately be demoted to the dull catalogue of common things?
Based on his post eventually insisting on the a priori incoherence of such possibilities (we look inside the dryad and find out he’s not made of dull quarks), I inferred that he thought fundamentally mental things, too, are excluded a priori. You seem to now disagree, as I do. Is that right?
Where things seem to get fuzzy is where things seem to go wrong. Nevertheless, forging ahead..
fundamentally mental things
If they are being called “fundamentally mental” because they interact by one set of rules with things that are mental and a different set of rules with things that are not mental, then it’s not consistent with a reductionist worldview (and it’s also confused because you’re not getting at how mental is different from non-mental). However, if they are being called fundamentally mental because they happen to be mechanistically involved in mental mechanisms, but still interact with all quarks in one consistent way everywhere, it’s logically possible.
Also you asked if these qualions could be indeterministic. It doesn’t matter if you apply this question to a hypothesized new particle. The question is, is indeterminism possible in a closed system? If so, we could postulate quarks as a source of indeterminism.
If they are being called “fundamentally mental” because they interact by one set of rules with things that are mental and a different set of rules with things that are not mental, then it’s not consistent with a reductionist worldview...
Is it therefore a priori logically incoherent? That’s what I’m trying to understand. Would you exclude a “cartesian theatre” fundamental particle a priori?
(and it’s also confused because you’re not getting at how mental is different from non-mental). However, if they are being called fundamentally mental because they happen to be mechanistically involved in mental mechanisms, but still interact with all quarks in one consistent way everywhere, it’s logically possible.
What do you mean by mechanical? I think we’re both resting on some hidden assumption about dividing the mental from the physical/mechanical. I think you’re right that it’s hard to articulate, but this makes Eliezer’s original argument even more confusing. Could you clarify whether or not you’re agreeing with his argument?
If they are being called “fundamentally mental” because they interact by one set of rules with things that are mental and a different set of rules with things that are not mental, then it’s not consistent with a reductionist worldview..
I deduce that the above case would be inconsistent with reductionism. And I think that it is logically incoherent, because I think non-reductionism is logically incoherent, because I think that reductionism is equivalent with the idea of a closed universe, which I think is logically necessary. You may disagree with any step in the chain of this reasoning.
What do you mean by mechanical?
I think you guessed: I meant that there is no division between the mental and physical/mechanical. Believing that a division is a priori possible is definitely non-reductionist. If that is what Eliezer is saying, then I agree with him.
To summarize, my argument is:
[logic --> closed universe --> reductionism --> no division between the mental and the physical/mechanical]
I feel that someone should point out how difficult this discussion might be in light of the overwhelming empirical evidence for reductionism. Non-reductionist theories tend to get… reduced. In other words, reductionism’s logical status is a fairly fine distinction in practice.
That said, I wonder if the claim can’t be near-equivalently rephrased “it’s impossible to imagine a non-reductionist scenario without populating it with your own arbitrary fictions”. Your use of the term “conceivable” seems to mean (or include) something like “choose an arbitrary state space of possible worlds and an observation relation over that space”. Clearly anything goes.
You’re simply expanding your definition of “everything” to include arbitrary chunks of state space you bolted on, some of which are underdetermined by their interactions with every previous part of “everything”. I don’t have a fully fleshed-out logical theory of everything on hand, so I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt that what you’re saying isn’t logically invalid. Either way, it’s pointless. If there’s no link between levels, there’s no way to distinguish between states in the extended space except by some additional a priori process. Good luck acquiring or communicating evidence for such processes.
Ah, that’s very interesting. Now we’re getting somewhere.
I don’t think it has to be arbitrary. Couldn’t the following scenario be the case?:
The universe is full of entities that experiments show reducible to fundamental elements with laws (say, quarks), or entities that induction + parsimony tells us ought to be reducible to fundamental elements (since these entities are made of quarks, we just haven’t quite figured out the reduction of their emergent properties yet)… BUT there is one exception in this universe, a certain type of stuff whose behavior is quantifiable, yet not reducible to quarks. In fact, we have no reason to believe this certain type of stuff is even made of the fundamental stuff everything else seems to be. Every experiment would defy reducing this entity down to quarks, to the point that it would actually be against Occam’s Razor to try and reduce this entity to quarks! It would be a type of dualism, I suppose. It’s not a priori logically excluded, and it’s not arbitrary.
I think we might separate the ideas that there’s only one type of particle and that the world is reductionist. It is an open question as to whether everything can be reduced to a single fundamental thing (like strings) and it wouldn’t be a logical impossibility to discover that there were two or three kinds of things interacting. (Or would it?)
Reductionism, as I understand it, is the idea that the higher levels are completely explained by (are completely determined by) the lower levels. Any fundamentally new type of particle found would just be added to what we consider “lower level”.
So what does it say about the world that it is reductionist? I propose the following two things are being asserted:
(1) There’s no rule that operates at an intermediate level that doesn’t also operate on the lower levels. This means that you can’t start adding new rules when a certain level of organization is reached. For example, if you have a law that objects with mass behave a certain way, you can’t apply it to everything that has mass but not quarks. This is a consistency rule.
(2) Any rule that applies to an intermediate level is reducible to rules that can be expressed with and applied at the lower level. For example, we have the rule that two competing organisms cannot coexist in the same niche. Even though it would be very difficult to demonstrate, a reductionist worldview argues that in principle this rule can be derived from the rules we already apply to quarks.
When people argue about reductionism, they are usually arguing about (2). They have some idea that at a certain level of organization, new rules can come into play that simply aren’t expressible in the lower levels—they’re totally new rules.
Here’s a thought experiment about an apple that helped me sort through these ideas:
Suppose that I have two objects, one in my right hand and one in my left hand. The one in my left hand is an apple. The one in my right hand has exactly the same quarks in exactly the same states. But somehow, for some reason, they’re different. This implies that there is some degree of freedom between the lower level and the higher level. Now it follows that this free state is determined in some way; to determine an apple in my left hand and a non-apple in my right, either by some kind of rule or randomly, or both. In any case, we would observe this rule. Call it X. So the higher level, the object being an apple or non-apple, depends upon the lower levels and X.
(a) Was X there all along ? If so, X is part of the lower level and we just discovered it, we need to add it in to our lower level theory.
(b) What if X wasn’t “there” all along? What if for some reason, X only applies at intermediate levels? …either because
The case (a) doesn’t assert anything about the universe, it just illustrates a confusion that can result from not understanding what “lower level” means. I don’t think (b) in either part is logically impossible because you can run a simulation with these rules.
Until you require (and obviously you want to) that the universe is a closed system. Then I don’t think you can have b(i) or b(ii). A rule (Rule 1) that is inconsistently applied (bi) requires another rule (Rule 2) determining when to apply it. Rule 1 being inconsistent in a system means that Rule 2 is outside the system. If a phenomenon cannot be described by the states of the system (the lower level) (bii) then it depends on something else outside the system. So I think I’ve deduced that the logical impossibility of reductionism depends upon the universe being a closed system.
If the physical universe isn’t closed—if we allow the metaphysical—then non-reductionism is not logically impossible.
Where does randomness come in? Is the universe necessarily deterministic because of (bii) being impossible, so that the higher levels must depend deterministically on the lower levels? (I’m talking about whether a truly stochastic component is possible in Brownian motion or the creation of particles in a vacuum, etc).
Another thing to think about is how these ideas affect our theories about gravity. We have no direct evidence that gravity satisfies consistency or that it is expressible in terms of lowest level physics. Does anyone know if any well-considered theories are ever proposed for gravity that don’t satisfy these rules?
Oh! Certainly. But this doesn’t seem to exclude “mind”, or some element thereof, from being irreducible—which is what Eliezer was trying to argue, right? He’s trying to support reductionism, and this seems to include an attack on “fundamentally mental” entities. Based on what you’re saying, though, there could be a fundamental type of particle, called “feelions,” or “qualions”—the entities responsible for what we call “mind”—which would not reduce down to quarks, and therefore would deserve to be called their own fundamental type of “stuff.” It’s a bit weird to me to call this a reductionist theory, and its certainly not a reductionist materialist theory.
Everything else you said seems to me right on—emergent properties that are irreducible to their constituents in principle seems somewhat incoherent to me.
In what way would these “feelions” or “qualions” not be materials? Your answer to this question may reveal some interesting hidden assumptions.
Are you sure it’s weird because it’s not reductionist? Or because such a theory would never be seen outside of a metaphysical theory? So you automatically link the idea that minds are special because they have “qualions” with “metaphysical nonsense”.
But what if qualions really existed, in a material way and there were physical laws describing how they were caught and accumulated by neural cells. There’s absolutely no evidence for such a theory, so it’s crazy, but its not logically impossible or inconsistent with reductionism, right?
Hmm… excellent point. Here I do think it begins to get fuzzy… what if these qualions fundamentally did stuff that we typically attribute to higher-level functions, such as making decisions? Could there be a “self” qualion? Could their behavior be indeterministic in the sense that we naively attribute to humans? What if there were one qualion per person, which determined everything about their consciousness and personality irreducibly? I feel that, if these sorts of things were the case, we would no longer be within the realm of a “material” theory. It seems that Eliezer would agree:
Based on his post eventually insisting on the a priori incoherence of such possibilities (we look inside the dryad and find out he’s not made of dull quarks), I inferred that he thought fundamentally mental things, too, are excluded a priori. You seem to now disagree, as I do. Is that right?
Where things seem to get fuzzy is where things seem to go wrong. Nevertheless, forging ahead..
If they are being called “fundamentally mental” because they interact by one set of rules with things that are mental and a different set of rules with things that are not mental, then it’s not consistent with a reductionist worldview (and it’s also confused because you’re not getting at how mental is different from non-mental). However, if they are being called fundamentally mental because they happen to be mechanistically involved in mental mechanisms, but still interact with all quarks in one consistent way everywhere, it’s logically possible.
Also you asked if these qualions could be indeterministic. It doesn’t matter if you apply this question to a hypothesized new particle. The question is, is indeterminism possible in a closed system? If so, we could postulate quarks as a source of indeterminism.
Is it therefore a priori logically incoherent? That’s what I’m trying to understand. Would you exclude a “cartesian theatre” fundamental particle a priori?
What do you mean by mechanical? I think we’re both resting on some hidden assumption about dividing the mental from the physical/mechanical. I think you’re right that it’s hard to articulate, but this makes Eliezer’s original argument even more confusing. Could you clarify whether or not you’re agreeing with his argument?
I deduce that the above case would be inconsistent with reductionism. And I think that it is logically incoherent, because I think non-reductionism is logically incoherent, because I think that reductionism is equivalent with the idea of a closed universe, which I think is logically necessary. You may disagree with any step in the chain of this reasoning.
I think you guessed: I meant that there is no division between the mental and physical/mechanical. Believing that a division is a priori possible is definitely non-reductionist. If that is what Eliezer is saying, then I agree with him.
To summarize, my argument is:
[logic --> closed universe --> reductionism --> no division between the mental and the physical/mechanical]