Re­duc­tion­ism (Se­quence)

How to take reality apart into pieces… and live in that universe, where we have always lived, without feeling disappointed about the fact that complicated things are made of simpler things.

Definitely one of the core LW sequences. Written by Eliezer Yudkowsky, ran from 08 Mar 2008 to 05 Apr 2008, with scattered other posts elsewhere.

Items in italic are potentially skippable; items in bold are extra-important.

This sequence follows Mysterious Answers to Mysterious Questions and requires the following posts from it:

• Making Beliefs Pay Rent

• The Virtue of Narrowness

• Hindsight Bias

• Fake Explanations

• Guessing the Teacher’s Password

• Fake Causality

• Mysterious Answers to Mysterious Questions

• The Futility of Emergence

• Explain/​Worship/​Ignore

This sequence follows A Human’s Guide to Words and requires at least the following posts from it:

• How An Algorithm Feels From Inside

• Feel the Meaning

• Taboo Your Words

• Replace the Symbol with the Substance

Early posts out of sequence:

• Universal Fire

• Universal Law

Main sequence

• Dissolving the Question

• Wrong Questions

• Righting a Wrong Question

• Mind Projection Fallacy

• Probability is in the Mind

• The Quotation is not the Referent

• Qualitatively Confused

• Reductionism

• Explaining vs. Explaining Away

• Fake Reductionism

• Savanna Poets

• The subsequence Joy in the Merely Real (main post here)

• Hand vs. Fingers

• Angry Atoms

• Heat vs. Motion

• Brain Breakthrough! It’s Made of Neurons!

• Reductive Reference

• The subsequence on Zombies

• Excluding the Supernatural

• Psychic Powers

See also

• Reductionism

Alternative formats

• Podcast: http://​​castify.co/​​channels/​​43-reductionism

• Readlists: This is a compilation of the sequence Reductionism available as an ebook (mobi, epub) http://​​readlists.com/​​7afaf45e/​​