Ben Jones. I am not arguing against reductionism. I am arguing in favor of reductionism. My point is that fundamental particles are not the deepest level we can reduce to.
Latanius. I did not mean that my experience is in some way special, but rather that if you start with a model that does not involve observers, i do not think you will be able to derive the existence of an observer, even if you can predict their behavior with some accuracy. You might, for example, predict that an ai will act in a manner that we would recognize as angry, but you will have no way to approach the question of weather or not the ai is actually experiencing anger, nor any way to even really understand what it means to act in an angry manner. Further more, the idea that the universe amounts to billiard balls bouncing around with out any observers is a bias that physics started with and has been trying to rid itself of. It has already partially done this by incorporating observers into physical models, by for instance noting that the mass of an object depends on the inertial frame of reference of the observer, but I think physics has farther to go to this end, and I think the way to go about this is to define basic elements of physical models directly in terms of the subjective experience of observers, rather then skipping that step and jumping right to fundamental partials, which is an abstract concept that comes from our intuition.
Ben Jones. I am not arguing against reductionism. I am arguing in favor of reductionism. My point is that fundamental particles are not the deepest level we can reduce to.
Latanius. I did not mean that my experience is in some way special, but rather that if you start with a model that does not involve observers, i do not think you will be able to derive the existence of an observer, even if you can predict their behavior with some accuracy. You might, for example, predict that an ai will act in a manner that we would recognize as angry, but you will have no way to approach the question of weather or not the ai is actually experiencing anger, nor any way to even really understand what it means to act in an angry manner. Further more, the idea that the universe amounts to billiard balls bouncing around with out any observers is a bias that physics started with and has been trying to rid itself of. It has already partially done this by incorporating observers into physical models, by for instance noting that the mass of an object depends on the inertial frame of reference of the observer, but I think physics has farther to go to this end, and I think the way to go about this is to define basic elements of physical models directly in terms of the subjective experience of observers, rather then skipping that step and jumping right to fundamental partials, which is an abstract concept that comes from our intuition.