So is the 747 made of something other than quarks? No, you’re just modeling it with representational elements that do not have a one-to-one correspondence with the quarks of the 747. The map is not the territory.
To me it is an irrelevant accident that physical objects, unlike informational objects, happen to be reducible to quarks. After all, if you accept the possibility that we live in a simulation, I see no reason other than laziness to use the same substrate for different entities. But I agree that the best examples come from “computationalism”: the same FAT file system can be implemented in multiple ways, some reducible to magnetic domains on a floppy disk, others only to the API calls from a sandboxed virtual machine.
EY says:
To me it is an irrelevant accident that physical objects, unlike informational objects, happen to be reducible to quarks. After all, if you accept the possibility that we live in a simulation, I see no reason other than laziness to use the same substrate for different entities. But I agree that the best examples come from “computationalism”: the same FAT file system can be implemented in multiple ways, some reducible to magnetic domains on a floppy disk, others only to the API calls from a sandboxed virtual machine.
Not entirely. Electrons are not of quarks. You can’t have a 747 made from quarks only. [Nitpicking.]
I’m guessing that this reply is to the EY’s original post and is here by mistake.
In fact it is. But let it stay here.