Rationality Quotes—July 2009
(Last month’s started a little late, I thought I’d bring it back to its original schedule.)
A monthly thread for posting any interesting rationality-related quotes you’ve seen recently on the Internet, or had stored in your quotesfile for ages.
Please post all quotes separately (so that they can be voted up (or down) separately) unless they are strongly related/ordered.
Do not quote yourself (or your sockpuppets).
Do not quote comments/posts on LW/OB—if we do this, there should be a separate thread for it.
No more than 5 quotes per person per monthly thread, please.
John Holt, Freedom and Beyond, p. 119
See also this comment by Z_M_Davis.
-- John C. Wright, Fugitives of Chaos
-- Princess Waltz
Commentary: What’s odd is not how many people think they contain other people. What’s odd is how many of those people think the other person is the real one.
But we do—in the same sense that racing sims contain cars.
The person I think of as “me”, the person the world sees, and the person that could be figured out by a very detailed examination of my actions would probably each barely resemble the other. Also, they would shift over quite short timescales as bits of personality are triggered and demoted by context. I can’t really claim to be a unitary person, only a unitary brain. So “the real me” is a terribly messy question. Or 1.5 kg of grey goop, depending how it’s asked.
Yes, humans try to present themselves as simple, so that others can understand and trust them. But humans really are quite complex. Hence an inevitable divergence between what we are and how we appear must be managed. Hence others can reasonably wonder of how we appear is how we really are.
Voted up for striking very home for me—I just finished watching His and Her Circumstances, which had far too much adolescent wangst about ‘real mes’.
voted up for “wangst”.
Perhaps the “person inside” is a metaphor for the vision of who they would like to become?
John Holt, How Children Fail, p. 101
See also Paul Lockhart.
-- Mark Thompson
-- Voltaire
But usually causality doesn’t run in that direction. Those who already wish to commit atrocities will go out of their way to seek absurd beliefs.
Voltaire, being an ideas person, overestimates the impact of ideas.
Sorry, but I was immediately reminded of 9-11
“Experiment and theory often show remarkable agreement when performed in the same laboratory.”
-- Daniel Bershader
-from Net of Magic, by Lee Siegel
This seems to me to be a confusion over senses of the word “real”. “Real magic” as opposed to “Not real magic” here is simply used in the analogous sense of “Do you like like me?” vs. “Or do you just like me?”. Whether “real magic” can in fact be done did not enter into the mind of the questioner in the above scenario. Hence “real” there is used in the sense of “genuine” instead of “actual”.
This is a common pitfall for quotes/aphorisms. Their short length is an incentive for conciseness, but it can also become an end in itself. Hence leading us to tradeoff meaning for superficial features like symmetry, rhyme, etc.
The Mathemagician nodded knowingly and stroked his chin several times. “You’ll find,” he remarked gently, “that the only thing you can do easily is be wrong, and that’s hardly worth the effort.”
-- Norton Juster, The Phantom Tollbooth
-- Alphadominance
It’s pretty depressing. Not too long ago, someone I know expressed the belief that red is more likely to come up on a roulette table if the last five spins landed on black. He holds a graduate degree in computer science.
If all I knew was that the last five spins landed on black, if I had to bet red or black, I’d bet black. There could be a bias in the wheel, although roulette wheels in today’s casinos are pretty much free from biases. (I’d still prefer not to bet on roulette at all, though, at least not given the standard casino payouts.)
Representativeness heuristic. It’s what humans have as a hardwired probability estimator, unless they learn counter-intuitive maths.
I don’t blame him, it’s a fairly common mistake if you don’t actively think it through.
ow ow ow ow ow.
Poker is actually an interesting social experiment of how badly a game can twist people’s minds about randomness. Even the most rational players have hard time maintaining sanity when their brains are pattern-matching from data that does not have patterns (ie. deal of cards).
-- Edsger Dijkstra
Edit: Added context to “rabbits” in brackets.
Rabbits?
“Philosophy triumphs easily over past and future evils; but present evils triumph over it.”
-- Francois de La Rochefoucauld
I’ve never quite understood that quote; is Rochefoucauld being very sarcastic about the (lack of) use of philosophy, or is he saying something else?
Observing that we nobly analyse distant things, and in the present do whatever the hell we want.
No… it’s just correct. Philosophy is very good at figuring out where we’ve gone wrong, or figuring out how to do things better next time. But in the present, philosophers are very good at getting fired and executed when they’re against the authority. (cf Nazi Germany, or France when Aristotle went temporarily out of fashion in the Church)
My guess is that most philosophers in those situations were good at accommodating the powers that be and did not get fired and/or executed.
-- Terry Pratchett, ‘Hogfather’
-- Terry Pratchett, ‘Hogfather’
-- pg
-- Edward de Bono
Isn’t this obvious and also arguing against only a straw-man position with respect to intelligence and intellectual skill—namely that intellectual skill is a function of one variable (intelligence) and that all other factors (such as industriousness & creativity) have no impact on intellectual skill?
It’s phrased as if it conveys some deep wisdom, when the reality is that almost all reasonably intelligent people already believe this.
Reminds me of the Geography teacher I had with cerebral palsy, compared to college kids with no aspirations beyond working a coffee shop.
-- David Stove, What Is Wrong With Our Thoughts
--Abba Lerner
Some say a political transaction is a solved economic problem, that politics is about finding and fixing market failures. If there can be market failures, then economic transactions can create political problems that need to be solved.
A lot of political transactions that I observe create economic problems.
“I am about to discuss the disease called ‘sacred’. It is not, in my opinion, any more divine or more sacred than other diseases, but has a natural cause, and its supposed divine orgin is due to men’s inexperience, and to their wonder at its peculiar character”
--Hippocractic treatise on epilepsy
---John Holt, What Do I Do Monday?
-- Samuel Johnson
-- Albert Einstein
Both these quotes sound nice, but do we have evidence for them?
If they are false they are small violations of truth and thus inconsequential.
The scope of the Einstein quote is “anyone”, and claims that we can infer distrust based on “minor” transgressions. I’d say this is a fairly significant claim, and would be more than just a “small” violation of truth were it found to be false.
Agreed, but saying a medium-sized violation of truth is a small violation of truth is only a small violation of truth and thus inconsequential.
I wanted to reply thus:
Thank you. Maybe I’m a dark person, but I want to learn to argue like that someday.
But then I contemplated that desire and banished it. So thanks anyway, and an upvote.
Making accurate significant claims in comments on obscure blogs isn’t often consequential.
.......
By Ta Nehisi Coates
FYI, Less Wrong accepts Markdown syntax in comments.
Corrected a mere 8 months later.
---John Holt, What Do I Do Monday?
Compare “Where Recursive Justification Hits Bottom”
Speak to us more of this book.
I haven’t read it, but I have read quite a bit of other things by John Holt.
He is known mainly as a theorist of education (the title of the above-quoted book may be a reference to a teacher trying to plan class activities) but he would probably say that he was interested in learning, and interested in education only inasmuch as it helps or hinders learning. He is the primary initiator of the “unschooling” philosophy of homeschooling.
I have posted some other John Holt quotes elsewhere in this post’s thread.
Related to that:
“We don’t see things as they are, we see things as we are.”
-- Anais Nin
When I first saw this, I had a negative gut reaction. The second sentence especially bothered me. Over time, I’ve come to like it more. I’m now at the point of wanting to follow it but usually failing to do so.
Discussions here on akrasia seem to focus on procrastination, but this is my own very close number two.
That quote touches a sore spot on me due to the recent death of Erik Naggum. He was a controversial figure, and I find myself struggling to refrain from discussing whether he was right or wrong; discussions that are certain to turn into time consuming quarrels. It seems like an important struggle because his premature death emphasises that life is too short for quarrelling on the internet.
Life may be too short for quarrelling on the Internet; but I know I derived much more value from his writings than I may’ve from whatever he did in the Norwegian oil industry.
-- Thomas Cleary, Introduction to The Art of War
“On the contrary, it’s because someone knows something about it that we can’t talk about physics. It’s the things that nobody knows about that we can discuss. We can talk about the weather; we can talk about social problems; we can talk about psychology; we can talk about international finance… so it’s the subject that nobody knows anything about that we can all talk about! ”
-- Richard Feynman
He’d be correct if he’d said we can discuss the subjects we think no one knows anything about. I wonder; did Feynman think no one knew anything about psychology?
Given the story of his encounter with the psychologist (also in Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!), I’d say he thought so, and ditto with the other fields he mentioned. I believe he was criticizing acceptable social conversation (at the Nobel Prize banquet, I believe!) as being restricted to topics on which nobody sufficiently facile with words could be conclusively shown to be wrong.
The conversation took place in 1965; if Feynman believed that, as is likely, he was very probably correct. On the other hand, a lot of people probably thought they knew something about psychology; it was a popular subject at the time.
“I’m moved to laughter at the thought of how presumptuous it would be to reject mathematics for philosophical reasons. How would you like the job of telling the mathematicians that they must change their ways…now that philosophy has discovered that there are no classes? Can you tell them, with a straight face, to follow philosophical argument wherever it leads? If they challenge your credentials, will you boast of philosophy’s other great discoveries: that motion is impossible, that a Being than which no greater can be conceived cannot be conceived not to exist, that it is unthinkable that anything exists outside the mind, that time is unreal, that no theory has ever been made at all probable by evidence (but on the other hand that an empirically ideal theory cannot possibly be false), that it is a wide-open scientific question whether anyone has ever believed anything, and so on, and on, ad nauseam? Not me!”
-- David Lewis, ‘Parts of Classes’
Apparently Lewis is implicitly contrasting math to some other fields where it would be OK for philosophers to correct the beliefs of others. What are those other fields?
Is he? I actually didn’t get that impression.
Lewis held that our common-sense-beliefs have greater initial plausibility than every philosophical argument against them, be it in mathematics (“there are numbers”) or metaphysics (“there is time”), philosophy of mind (“there are beliefs”), ethics, etc.
Philosophy can help to find a realiser—a best candidate—for the role of numbers, beliefs, etc., but the price for “losing our moorings” (after g.e. moore), i.e., denying common-sense propositions, is almost always too high.
There is at least one case, of course, where Lewis was willing to pay: modal realism.
John Von Neumann
“To stay young requires unceasing cultivation of the ability to unlearn old falsehoods.”
-- Robert A. Heinlein (to be precise, his character Lazarus Long, but I don’t think there’s much difference)
But is it true? Do young folks have more of an ability to unlearn falsehoods than old folks?
I think it is true relative to the average young folk and the average old folk. To the extent that there is an uncommon skill involved in unlearning falsehoods, we can imagine people who get better at this skill by practice and learning over time. And hence, as it were, “stay young”.
I think the point of the quote is not that young folks are more able to unlearn falsehoods; it’s that they haven’t learned as many falsehoods as old people, just by virtue of not having been around as long. If you can unlearn falsehoods, you can keep a “young” (falsehood-free) mind.
I don’t think that’s necessarily the thrust of the quote. It doesn’t say “to remain youthful, with respect to the ability to unlearn falsehoods, requires unceasing cultivation of this ability”. I don’t know the context or the intent behind the quote, but it doesn’t seem to imply for sure that young people generally have more of this ability than older people.
The only context is that it appears in a set of other sayings of Lazarus Long in the interlude chapters of “Time Enough For Love”, later collected into “The Notebooks of Lazarus Long”. I’ve always thought it reasonable to assume that this is Heinlein himself talking. He had more of these aphorisms than could be worked into the dialogue.
Some people through the years accumulate more and more knowledge and beliefs, not all true, and never unlearn any of them. Whatever they acquire, they cling to, and end up as stiff, bitter old folks railing against a world they can no longer deal with. Others retain a lively intellect indefinitely, by always being open to the truth—that is, to discovering that they were wrong. That is my interpretation of the quote.
As someone else put it:
“The things that we learn prevent us from learning.”
-- W. Roy Whitten
-- E.T. Jaynes, summarizing all of Eliezer’s posts
-- Homer Simpson
“The range of what we think and do is limited by what we fail to notice. And because we fail to notice that we fail to notice there is little we can do to change until we notice that failing to notice shapes our thoughts and deeds.”
-- R.D. Laing, Knots
It could be of course that you are limited by other features of your psychology, and fail to notice because noticing such things doesn’t lead to useful or sexy behavior. Such discriminating failure to notice things can’t be mere random stupidity.
Actually by Daniel Goleman. It comes from Goleman’s book, Vital Lies, Simple Truths: The Psychology of Self-Deception, which looks relevant to the mission of Less Wrong.
-- Edward de Bono
Except that language is a living, breathing thing, and words are constantly being invented, falling out of favor, taking on new meanings and losing old ones.
-- Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett, ‘Good Omens’
In other words, let’s replace an attempt to understand human history as a result of the moral axioms of its actors with an extremely vague and lazy tautology.
I hear this kind of nonsense all the time when discussing the negative effects of religion. “Oh, it’s not because of their religious beliefs that Muslims are more likely to be terrorists than any other religious group, it’s because they’re people.” It’s a refusal to try and figure out why people act as they do.
I view it as the opposite. It seems to suggest figuring out what people are rather than throwing up our hands and calling them good/evil/crazy/etc. Kind of like this. YMMV.
You can either throw up your hands or try to come to a greater understanding regardless of whether you call people ‘people’ or ‘evil’ or ‘crazy’, but the last two adjectives are more precise descriptors.
There is no concept of “evil” or “crazy” in objective reality, but there is a concept of “people”. The quote reminds us that understanding human behaviour begins by accepting that people do what they do exactly because they are people—that is, instances of a very specific mental architecture forged by blind evolution in very specific circumstances on this specific planet.
More precise? Yes. More accurate? No. Inaccurate? Yes.
Exactly.
-Fry of the show Futurama perceives the future well
At the other end of the spectrum are the opponents of reductionism who are appalled by what they feel to be the bleakness of modern science. To whatever extent they and their world can be reduced to a matter of particles or fields and their interactions, they feel diminished by that knowledge....I would not try to answer these critics with a pep talk about the beauties of modern science. The reductionist worldview is chilling and impersonal. It has to be accepted as it is, not because we like it, but because that is the way the world works.
--Steven Weinberg
Yeah… I understand the sentiment, but as someone who delivers those pep talks, I do think, in all seriousness, that the guy’s wrong. If we weren’t made out of particles we’d be made out of something else. Particles is just the stuff that stuff turns out to be made of. Anyone who has a problem with this has misunderstood something, or their real problem is something else.
For example, it is very depressing that people who die are gone forever. But this is not a matter of them being made out of particles. It would be just as bad if they were made out of freeplegrunge and then ceased to exist forever.
I recently watched your second bloggingheads debate with Adam Frank and the point you make above is one I think you should have stated clearly in that debate. Mr (Prof?) Frank based part of his argument on the feeling of fulfillment that one receives being in a relationship and believing that there is a metaphysical element to the relationship (and similar situations). Yet he does not actually believe that metaphysical element exists...only that the belief has some kind of psychological benefit. The way you addressed your position made it sound like the reductionist view is one in which feelings of fulfillment and “meaning” (a term that I think is fairly weakly defined in these discussions) cannot exist or exist differently. I know this was not your point.
Someone who has a fuzzy warm feeling from a metaphysical belief is still getting warm and fuzzy in a physical world in which their belief is wrong. There is nothing inherent about the nature of the world or knowing things about the nature of the world that precludes feeling satisfied, happy, warm, complete, or fulfilled. Those feelings exist within the substrate of physical material that makes up the world already. As you have pointed out before, those feelings would be all the more genuine and meaningful if they were founded on beliefs that more closely matched the actual working world.
I think in that debate you were approaching this topic somewhat from the side of things.
“I read the book of Job last night, I don’t think God comes out well in it.”
Virginia Woolf
Actually, I agree. I’m not entirely clear on why people being made out of particles might be a bad thing. It’s just the last clause of the last sentence that I find awesome. People talk about how atheists have no morality, or how there is no point to living if you’re an atheist, as if this is bayesian evidence against atheism. Besides the fact that they’re wrong.
I should have pointed that out.
Although that is true, I think people who believe in freeplegrunge also believe that freeplegrunge implies immortality; indeed, that’s the reason they believe in freeplegrunge, although they rarely admit it. So your statement misses the mark a bit; it’s not the lack of freeplegrunge people object to, it’s the lack of immortality. And that is not only depressing, it really is a property of particles as opposed to freeplegrunge; at least this is true in the minds of freeplegrungists, because of the very strong coupling between their freeplegrunge-belief and their immortality-belief.
I thought about med school again, the anatomy class I had told Jason about. Candice Boone, my one-time almost-fiancée, had shared that class with me. She had been stoic during the dissection but not afterward. A human body, she said, ought to contain love, hate, courage, cowardice, soul, spirit … not this slimy assortment of blue and red imponderables. Yes. And we ought not to be dragged unwilling into a harsh and deadly future.
But the world is what it is and won’t be bargained with. I said as much to Candice.
She told me I was “cold”. But it was still the closest thing to wisdom I had ever been able to muster.
Robert Charles Wilson, Spin
William James
Sagredo: [I]n my opinion nothing occurs contrary to nature except the impossible, and that never occurs. - “Two New Sciences” (1914 translation), Galileo Galilei
“Since the beginning, not one unusual thing has happened.”
(On a side note, does anyone know whether that’s original to Robin Brandt?)
A similar quote appears in Quantum Explanations—I imagine that’s who Robin Brandt quoted.
Yep, looks like it. That’s a problem with Google—if you search for Robin’s very slightly variant, you only turn up Robin; but google without quotes, and you’re lightyears away from any useful link.
Now that is very strange, if my Yahoo search is any indication.
(For the record: when I searched on Yahoo, it gave me “Quantum Explanations” as the very first hit. This may be a case of context-dependent searching, as I had immediately prior searched with the quotes.)
Edit: Fascinating! Look at Altavista!
Those results are way better than Google’s. You’re right about the interestingness—Yahoo and Altavista are infinitely superior in searching for non-quoted quotes. I’ll have to remember that in the future and not assume Google is always better.
“The reader in search of knock-down arguments in favor of my theories will go away disappointed. Whether or not it would be nice to knock disagreeing philosophers down by sheer force of argument, it cannot be done. Philosophical theories are never refuted conclusively. (or hardly ever. Gödel and Gettier may have done it.) The theory survives its refutation—at a price. Perhaps that is something we can settle more or less conclusively. But when all is said and done, and all the tricky arguments and distinctions and counterexamples have been discovered, presumably we will still face the question which prices are worth paying, which theories are on balance credible, which are the unacceptably counterintuitive consequences and which are the acceptably counterintuitive ones. On this question we may still differ. And if all is indeed said and done, there will be no hope of discovering still further arguments to settle our differences.”
-- David Lewis (thousand-year-old vampire)
Tamnor Sommers — Distributed Cognition and the Will: Individual Volition and Social Context, “The Illusion of Freedom Evolves”, p. 62, MIT Press, 2007
– Peter Shotwell, Go: More than a game
-- Raymond Smullyan
Surely, to label a statement “vague” is a higher order of insult than to call it “wrong”. Newton was wrong but at least he was not vague.
On the other hand, precise statements that are somewhere in the vicinity of the truth can be dangerous, because people tend to mistake precision for accuracy, and because modes of reasoning (e.g., formal logic) adapted to precise statements tend to be brittle—one can deduce very wrong conclusions from slightly wrong premises.
A charitable reading of Smullyan would be that when a precise statement is made, he likes to examine it as closely as its precision allows, to avoid such dangers; and that a vague statement, so far as it’s vague, is not worth the trouble of criticizing.
(For the avoidance of doubt: I think such a reading would probably be too charitable, and I upvoted Eliezer’s comment.)
I do not agree with all interpretations of the quote but primed by:
I interpreted it charitably with “critical” loosely implying “worth thinking about” in contrast to vague ideas that are not even wrong. Furthermore, from thefreedictionary.com definition of critical, “1. Inclined to judge severely and find fault.”, vague statements may be considered useless and so judged severely but much of the time they are also slippery in that they must be broken down into precise disjoint “meaning sets” where faults can be found. So vague ideas cannot necessarily be criticized directly in the fault finding sense. (Wide concepts that have useful delimitations in contrast to arbitrary ill-formed vague ones can be useful and are a powerful tool in generalization. In informal contexts these two meanings of vague overlap).
Given what I’ve read of The Tao is Silent, I’m inclined to take a more literal (and less agreeable) interpretation of his quote here.
Statements should be as precise as possible, but no more precise.
-- Albert Einstein
--Aristotle
Many of the arguments on LW remind me of this quote:
“for the obscurity of the distinctions and of the principles that they use is the reason why they talk about everything as confidently as if they knew about it, and defend everything they say about it against the most subtle and knowledgeable, without leaving any room to convince them of their mistake. In doing this they seem to me to resemble a blind person who, in order to fight without any disadvantage against a sighted person, would bring them into the depths of a very dark celar.”
-Rene Descartes from the Discourse on Method
-- Amy Hempel, ‘Tumble Home’
-- yosefk
Abraham Maslow
For many years I had a slight variant of this in my sig: “When the only tool you have is a hammer, all your problems start to look like nails”
Classic. I’ve heard it a lot (in multiple variations), but never with an attribution. Its Wikipedia article even has a citation! -- which shows the original (not particularly epigrammatic) wording as:
One request I must make of my reader, which is, that in judging these poems he would decide by his own feelings genuinely, and not by reflection upon what will probably be the judgment of others. How common is it to hear a person say, I myself do not object to this style of composition, or this or that expression, but to such and such classes of people it will appear mean or ludicrous! This mode of criticism, so destructive of all sound unadulterated judgment, is almost universal: let the reader then abide, independently, by his own feelings, and, if he finds himself affected, let him not suffer such conjectures to interfere with his pleasure.
Wordsworth’s preface to Lyrical Ballads, qtd. in Forms of Verse by Sara DeFord and Clarinda H. Lott, pg. 36
Link to a related claim of mine: “If you have to predict other peoples’ judgments a lot, your brain starts to count their predictive categories as “natural”. The effect can be viral . . .”
Seems apropos to recent posts on honesty, as well.
--Cat’s Cradle, Kurt Vonnegut
There are few ways in which a man can be more innocently employed than in getting money.
-- Samuel Johnson
-- Edsger Dijkstra
isomorphic to experiments in science, false and correct theories
Brian Clevinger, 8-Bit Theater
William Gibson — National Public Radio: “Fresh Air”, Aug. 31, 1993
Gibson, http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2001/apr/01/sciencefictionfantasyandhorror.features
-- Scott Adams, Dogbert’s Top Secret Management Handbook
James Lee Stanley
--William James, The Principles of Psychology 1890, Chapter IV
A.C. Grayling, from a recent Guardian mini-interview
(My interpretation: remember that our various seemingly nonsensical personality tics can mask other, more addressable concerns.)
-- Peter Watts, ‘Ambassador’
-- John Locke, Of the Conduct of Understanding
~ Bertrand Ruessell
Bryn Mawr Classical Review 2004.09.19 Robert Mayhew, The Female in Aristotle’s Biology. Reason or Rationalization. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004. Reviewed by Thornton Lockwood, Sacred Heart University
Note that since Aristotle was about as close to an empiricist as you’ll find those days, and discovered many exciting things about animals through direct observation, it’s unlikely that this mistake was due to not having checked.
Good to know. :)
-- A Deepness in the Sky, Vernor Vinge
“To practice any art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow. So do it” —I tried to find where I read it, but unsucessfully
EDIT: Googled, it’s by Kurt Vonnegut
Google says it’s Kurt Vonnegut.
yeah, very well put, every reason to give the art of rationality a chance
Chapterhouse Dune, Frank Herbert
-- Charles Eames
Peter Medawar — Pluto’s Republic, “Hypothesis and Imagination”, p. 117
WikiHow, “How to Avoid Cults That May Try to Convert You”
“Of Truth in Things False”, Proverbial Philosophy, Martin Farquhar Tupper
The message tempts me, but I have to remind myself that no matter how creative I am with my positive interpretations… sometimes bullshit is just better left as bullshit.
-- Jonathan Schaffer, ‘Is There a Fundamental Level?’
I googled around for this, and uncovered a rich seam of thought gone mad, including one complete lunatic insisting (in an academic journal, too) that nothing exists but quantum points, which have no relationship whatever to each other (and has also written about the secret rulers of the world in a book that an enthusiastic reviewer describes as more plausible than David Icke). Schaffer doesn’t seem to actually take a position on atomism or monism—here’s another paper by him.
None of the material I looked at contained the argument (which convinces me) that the simplest descriptions of reality use complex entities (rocks, people, uranium, etc.), and that all the soul-searching over what really exists is just thought gone wrong.
Richard, a few thoughts and questions: what other people and papers did you look at?
IMO, Schaffer is the most interesting philosopher working in metaphysics today. He has a lot of interesting papers on questions of ontological priority and fundamentality. Well worth exploring, and too complicated to discuss in detail here (here’s a link to all of his papers:)
In the end, he says, these are largely empirical questions, and that seems just about right. Many of his own argumets are of this sort (i.e., scientists finding ever deeper levels on the one hand, and entanglement on the other). And to me, his positions in the two papers seem largely consistent. There might be no fundamental level AND nonetheless a priority of the whole.
This quote is rather unclear—I had to look at the original source to determine what it might mean—and equally importantly, it seems rather useless. Schaffer wants to establish … something about being real, i guess, by his philosophy, but I don’t see how he would expect anything different thereby.
There is some tendency—or bias, if you wish—on this site to take reductionism for granted. Schaffer might help here. By reading him we might come to expect, with some probability, scientific findings that point to an infinite descent of ontological levels, and so to the failure of reductionism. His other goal is to argue against a stronger form of reductionism that comes easily with the first: eliminativism in regard to, say, qualia, or beliefs.
I’m not sure your (or his) argument actually addresses popular beliefs. Two points:
Reductionism has been proposed not (merely) because it is intuitive, but because it is supported by the evidence. Starting with particle physics, you really can infer chemistry, thermodynamics, fluid mechanics, solid mechanics, heat transfer, and so on—and you can make correct predictions about when the assumptions used in the latter will break down. (For example: when the channels of fluid flow are comparable in size to the particles.) This is just as would be the case in a reductionistic universe.
Eliminativism is no more implied by reductionism than amorality. If you think that rainbows don’t exist once they’ve been unweaved, you’re making a mistake that has nothing to do with science.
I still think it relevant:
ad 1.: that might be so, but it’s not all there is to reductionism, at least according to this or that attempt.
ad 2.: that might be so, but it’s nonetheless a theory people rather easily catch, along with reductionism. For example: If you take reductionism for granted, and some entity does not easily fit it, then you are seduced into eliminating that entity.
Eliezer makes the further claim in those pieces that non-reductionism is based on confusion and doesn’t lead to a coherent worldview, but that’s not a property of reductionism.
| If you take reductionism for granted, and some entity does not easily fit it, then you are seduced into eliminating that entity.
Are there any actual individuals you have in mind when you make this generalization? To my knowledge, I have never heard of an individual ignoring observed phenomena they could not predict reductively.
Ok, I wasn’t specific enough. I meant mainly that Eliezer also claimed that there is a fundamental level and that there are no funda-mental entities.
I take it you mean explain reductively? Anyway, behaviourism (and its problems with mental entities) seems the locus classicus. Or what about eliminativists like the churchlands or dennett (for qualia)? Or hartry field for numbers? There must be lots of others.
Point taken. Nevertheless, the fact that people draw absurd conclusions from a belief has no bearing on whether that belief should be questioned unless those absurd conclusions are (1) logical, rather than philosophical, inferences, and (2) contrary to evidence. Those conditions do not hold for reductionism (and Dennett, in particular, had a few things to say about “greedy reductionism”).
I’m not sure what you mean by ‘logical, rather than philosophical, inferences’. Aren’t most (all?) philosophical inferences logical?
A logical inference is inescapable. If the universe is purely deterministic, then everything that happens tomorrow can be predicted from a complete description of the laws of nature and state of the universe at this exact instant—this is a logical inference. But if the universe is purely deterministic, then the people in the universe might be fully responsible for their acts or they might not—philosophers have drawn both inferences, because the deduction depends on additional premises not stated in the syllogism.
Likewise, the inference from reductionism to the conclusion that ordinary things do not exist—what Dennett called “greedy reductionism”, and what you^H^H^Hspuckblase (sorry, didn’t look at the names!) offered Schaffer’s beliefs as an anodyne to—has been argued, but has also been denied, by philosophers. Its validity depends on other premises, such as what it means to exist.
I don’t believe that breaks anything. Tabooing “reductionism”, I don’t see how infinity of ontological levels (whatever that could mean) is a surprising view. The problem is with mental concepts, thoughts manifested in the rules of the game, a design implemented in terms of the territory happening to also be engraved in its deepest principles.
I’m afraid you sort of lost me after “mental concepts”, so the followong might not apply, but: “deepest principles” make no sense in an appropriate (as worked out by schaffer in the paper) account of infinite levels. His idea is that since every level is grounded by AND grounds another level, all entities on all levels are on an equal footing, including mental entities.
I suspected you might pay attention to that detail. The appropriate generalization just says that you don’t expect the same laws to apply at different levels (between levels): a concept in a mind (in a brain, that is a system constructed on top/in terms of lower levels) won’t obey the same laws as the lower-level stuff from which the mind is built. There is also a nice antisymmetry here: a mind can look at lower levels and organize its thoughts to model them, but lower levels can’t do the same to the thoughts in a mind.
What detail? What generalization of what? Is this supposed to be a refutation? If so, of what? Translation needed.
Sorry for the confusion. The detail of using the word “deepest” that doesn’t apply to the case where there is no bottom, and generalization from systems with a bottom to systems without. It was supposed to be a clarification of the sense in which I consider “mental” entities and what would make them irreducible.
Thanks for the attempt to clarify it for me. Do we actually disagree? Anyway, ill try to do a top-level post tomorrow to shake your (apparent) belief that mental entities need to have non-mental parts.
I see this whole discussion as royally confused and not worth pursuing unless a much more technical setting is introduced.
“Anyone who cannot cope with mathematics is not fully human. At best he is a tolerable subhuman who has learned to wear shoes, bathe, and not make messes in the house.”
-- Robert Heinlein (as Lazarus Long)
ETA: If I could downvote my own postings, I’d downvote this one. I won’t delete it, to leave the context for loqi’s response.
Dammit, I’ve read Distress and I know without looking exactly the context of the Egan quote. I was practically cheering for Rourke in that chapter. But there’s a big gap between encountering an idea and finding it good, and actually applying it after closing the book.
— Greg Egan (as James Rourke), Distress
Touché.
I read the quote from Lazarus Long in the original post as an olive branch to his opponents and a rebuke to his friends and allies. There is a concern underlying it that loqi’s rebuke completely misses.
First Lazarus Long offers a test of humanity that is open to all. The deaf, the homosexual, the Jew, etc, all may pass Long’s test. Read between the lines to find the implicit advice: Learn to cope with mathematics. It is good advice, good enough that it is a dangerous gift to give to ones enemies.
There is a saying in military circles that amateurs talk tactics, professionals talk logistics. An enemy that holds mathematics in contempt will blow off the logistical calculations behind his military campaigns. How many bullets do we need? How long will the march take? How much food do we need? Who cares, let us run at the enemy screaming!
An enemy that cannot cope with mathematics is seldom much of a threat; a friend or ally who cannot cope with mathematics is more dangerous. Simply moving the selector from single shot to fully automatic will let the innumerate comrade shoot off the expeditions ammunition in a matter of minutes, dooming the entire party.
Since the quote is from Lazarus Long we should think space opera. The ship has broken down and rescue is months away. Calculate the rations that let the crew survive. No doubt they are uncomfortably meagre. If too many cannot cope with mathmatics, refuse the unwelcome results of the calculation and insist on too large a ration, all will perish. This dilemma is a modern setting for a dilemma that was common in history. When the crops fail, meagre stocks must be nursed through a hungry winter. The sums are the same. Bryan Caplan captures the modern form of the problem.
Lazarus Long does not fear defeat by subhuman opponents. Why should he? He is sincerely believes that they are inferior. No. He fears being dragged down by his own side, most of who are no better.
Reasonable concerns, but I don’t think the “subhuman” terminology captures their meaning in the slightest. I generally don’t consider “human” to be synonymous with “useful”, “reliable”, or “competent”.
By “Long’s test” you still mean mathematics, right? “May”? Homosexuals “may” have heterosexual sex, deaf people “may” regain their hearing, and so on. Your statement seems to assume the very definition of humanity it’s trying to support.
--Larry Niven (N-Space)
John Holt, Never Too Late
-- Cervantes
...why?
It seems everyone’s been aiming at the same meta-level, so I thought I’d try something a bit less direct.
The quote, for me, comments on several common themes around here. Probably the strongest connections I make are to updating of priors based on evidence, and to the issue of communication, when the speakers possess different levels of self awareness and rational thinking ability.
The image is also one of the most recognizable from the book, and I thought it’s worth while having it referenced here—though I suppose I should have researched a less oblique quote.
I can guess at what you’re getting at, but it’s not really a sufficient quote to support the conclusions. If Don Quixote is good reading on the matter of rationality, that’s all to the good, but I can’t see it in just these five lines.
-- xkcd webcomic
Downvoted for improper use of quotation. The comic is successful because it effectively communicates its message by cleverly juxtaposing two panels that are identical except for the implied sex of one character, and one word in the other character’s line. To simply quote the second panel out of context doesn’t make any sense at all. Linking to the comic does not redeem this mistake—quotes are supposed to be able to stand on their own. Comics are a visual medium; sometimes, like in this case, they simply aren’t quotable.
Thanks for the explanations.