“And using rationalist buzzwords doesn’t make your argument rational. There is nothing ”magical“ about a system having properties that aren’t present in its components. That’s not what’s meant by ”magical thinking.“ ”
That is magical thinking right there—nothing is greater than the sum of its parts.
That’s quite confused thinking. For one thing. reductionism is a hypothesis. not a universal truth. For another, reductively understandable systems trivially have properties their components don’t have. Spreadsheets aren’t spreadsheaty all the way down.
It isn’t confused at all. Reductionism works fine for everything except sentience/consciousness, and it’s highly unlikely that it makes an exception for that either. Your “spreadsheaty” example of a property is a compound property, just as a spreadsheet is a compound thing and there is nothing involved in it that can’t be found in the parts because it is precisely the sum of its parts..
This file looks spreadsheety --> it’s got lots of boxy fields
That wordprocessor is spreadsheety --> it can carry out computations on elements
(Compound property with different components of that compound property being referred to in different contexts.)
A spreadsheet is a combination of many functionalities. What is its relevance to this subject? It’s been brought in to suggest that properties like “spreadsheety” can exist without having any trace in the components, but no—this compound property very clearly consists of components. It’s even clearer when you write the software and find that you have to build it out of components. The pattern in which the elements are brought together is an abstract component, and abstract components have no substance. When we’re dealing with sentience and looking for something to experience pain, relying on this kind of component to perform that role is more than a little fanciful. Even if we make such a leap of the imagination though and have sentient geometries, we still don’t have a model as to how this experience of pain (or any other kind of feeling) can transfer to the generation of data which documents that experience.
A spreadsheet is a combination of many functionalities. What is its relevance to this subject? It’s been brought in to suggest that properties like “spreadsheety” can exist without having any trace in the components, but no—this compound property very clearly consists of components.
No to your “no”. There is no spreadsheetiness at all in the components, despite the spreadsheet being built, in a comprehsnsible way, from components. These are two different claims.
When we’re dealing with sentience and looking for something to experience pain, relying on this kind of component to perform that role is more than a little fanciful
Reductionism is about explanation.
If we can’t explain how experience is built out of parts, then it is an exception to reductionism. But you say there are no exceptions.
If something is “spreadsheety”, it simply means that it has something significant in common with spreadsheets, as in shared components. A car is boxy if it has a similar shape to a box. The degree to which something is “spreadsheety” depends on how much it has in common with a spreadsheet, and if there’s a 100% match, you’ve got a spreadsheet.
If something is “spreadsheety”, it simply means that it has something significant in common with spreadsheets, as in shared components. A car is boxy if it has a similar shape to a box. The degree to which something is “spreadsheety” depends on how much it has in common with a spreadsheet,
It shows that there are components and that these emergent properties are just composites.
“An exception to reductionism is called magic.” --> Nor does that. It’s just namecalling.
It’s a description of what happens when gaps in science are explained away by invoking something else. The magical appearance of anything that doesn’t exist in the components is the abandonment of science.
Sentience is unresolved, but it’s explorable by science and it should be possible to trace back the process by which the data is generated to see what its claims about sentience are based on, so we will get answers on it some day. For everything other than sentience/consciousness though, we see no examples of reductionism failing.
We have tried tracing back reports of qualia, and what you get is a causal story in which qualia as such , feelings rather than neural firings, don’t feature.
Doing more of the same will probably result in the same. So there is no great likelihood that the problem of sentience will succumb to a conventional approach.
The data making claims about feelings must be generated somewhere by a mechanism which will either reveal that it is merely generating baseless assertions or reveal a trail on from there to a place where actual feelings guide the generation of that data in such a way that the data is true. Science has clearly not traced this back far enough to get answers yet because we don’t have evidence of either of the possible origins of this data, but in principle we should be able to reach the origin unless the mechanism passes on through into some inaccessible quantum realm. If you’re confident that it won’t go that far, then the origin of that data should show up in the neural nets, although it’ll take a devil of a long time to untangle them all and to pin down their exact functionality.
That’s quite confused thinking. For one thing. reductionism is a hypothesis. not a universal truth. For another, reductively understandable systems trivially have properties their components don’t have. Spreadsheets aren’t spreadsheaty all the way down.
It isn’t confused at all. Reductionism works fine for everything except sentience/consciousness, and it’s highly unlikely that it makes an exception for that either. Your “spreadsheaty” example of a property is a compound property, just as a spreadsheet is a compound thing and there is nothing involved in it that can’t be found in the parts because it is precisely the sum of its parts..
As with all non-trivial examples, the parts have to be combined in a very particular way: a spreadhseet is not a heap of components thrown together.
This file looks spreadsheety --> it’s got lots of boxy fields
That wordprocessor is spreadsheety --> it can carry out computations on elements
(Compound property with different components of that compound property being referred to in different contexts.)
A spreadsheet is a combination of many functionalities. What is its relevance to this subject? It’s been brought in to suggest that properties like “spreadsheety” can exist without having any trace in the components, but no—this compound property very clearly consists of components. It’s even clearer when you write the software and find that you have to build it out of components. The pattern in which the elements are brought together is an abstract component, and abstract components have no substance. When we’re dealing with sentience and looking for something to experience pain, relying on this kind of component to perform that role is more than a little fanciful. Even if we make such a leap of the imagination though and have sentient geometries, we still don’t have a model as to how this experience of pain (or any other kind of feeling) can transfer to the generation of data which documents that experience.
No to your “no”. There is no spreadsheetiness at all in the components, despite the spreadsheet being built, in a comprehsnsible way, from components. These are two different claims.
Reductionism is about explanation. If we can’t explain how experience is built out of parts, then it is an exception to reductionism. But you say there are no exceptions.
If something is “spreadsheety”, it simply means that it has something significant in common with spreadsheets, as in shared components. A car is boxy if it has a similar shape to a box. The degree to which something is “spreadsheety” depends on how much it has in common with a spreadsheet, and if there’s a 100% match, you’ve got a spreadsheet.
An exception to reductionism is called magic.
That does not demonstrate anything relevant.
Nor does that. It’s just namecalling.
“That does not demonstrate anything relevant.”
It shows that there are components and that these emergent properties are just composites.
“An exception to reductionism is called magic.” --> Nor does that. It’s just namecalling.
It’s a description of what happens when gaps in science are explained away by invoking something else. The magical appearance of anything that doesn’t exist in the components is the abandonment of science.
It shows that being a spreadsheet is unproblematically reductive. It doesn’t show that sentience is.
The insistence that something is true when there is no evidence is the abandandonment of science.
Sentience is unresolved, but it’s explorable by science and it should be possible to trace back the process by which the data is generated to see what its claims about sentience are based on, so we will get answers on it some day. For everything other than sentience/consciousness though, we see no examples of reductionism failing.
We have tried tracing back reports of qualia, and what you get is a causal story in which qualia as such , feelings rather than neural firings, don’t feature.
Doing more of the same will probably result in the same. So there is no great likelihood that the problem of sentience will succumb to a conventional approach.
The data making claims about feelings must be generated somewhere by a mechanism which will either reveal that it is merely generating baseless assertions or reveal a trail on from there to a place where actual feelings guide the generation of that data in such a way that the data is true. Science has clearly not traced this back far enough to get answers yet because we don’t have evidence of either of the possible origins of this data, but in principle we should be able to reach the origin unless the mechanism passes on through into some inaccessible quantum realm. If you’re confident that it won’t go that far, then the origin of that data should show up in the neural nets, although it’ll take a devil of a long time to untangle them all and to pin down their exact functionality.