The example of the paralysis anosognosia rationalization is, for some reason, extremely depressing to me.
Does anyone understand why this only happens in split brain patients when their right hemisphere motivates an action? Shouldn’t it happen quite often, since the right side has no way of communicating to the left side “its time to try a new theory,” and the left side is the one that we’ll be talking to?
If they are being called “fundamentally mental” because they interact by one set of rules with things that are mental and a different set of rules with things that are not mental, then it’s not consistent with a reductionist worldview...
Is it therefore a priori logically incoherent? That’s what I’m trying to understand. Would you exclude a “cartesian theatre” fundamental particle a priori?
(and it’s also confused because you’re not getting at how mental is different from non-mental). However, if they are being called fundamentally mental because they happen to be mechanistically involved in mental mechanisms, but still interact with all quarks in one consistent way everywhere, it’s logically possible.
What do you mean by mechanical? I think we’re both resting on some hidden assumption about dividing the mental from the physical/mechanical. I think you’re right that it’s hard to articulate, but this makes Eliezer’s original argument even more confusing. Could you clarify whether or not you’re agreeing with his argument?
what if qualions really existed, in a material way and there were physical laws describing how they were caught and accumulated by neural cells. There’s absolutely no evidence for such a theory, so it’s crazy, but its not logically impossible or inconsistent with reductionism, right?
Hmm… excellent point. Here I do think it begins to get fuzzy… what if these qualions fundamentally did stuff that we typically attribute to higher-level functions, such as making decisions? Could there be a “self” qualion? Could their behavior be indeterministic in the sense that we naively attribute to humans? What if there were one qualion per person, which determined everything about their consciousness and personality irreducibly? I feel that, if these sorts of things were the case, we would no longer be within the realm of a “material” theory. It seems that Eliezer would agree:
By far the best definition I’ve ever heard of the supernatural is Richard Carrier’s: A “supernatural” explanation appeals to ontologically basic mental things, mental entities that cannot be reduced to nonmental entities. This is the difference, for example, between saying that water rolls downhill because it wants to be lower, and setting forth differential equations that claim to describe only motions, not desires. It’s the difference between saying that a tree puts forth leaves because of a tree spirit, versus examining plant biochemistry. Cognitive science takes the fight against supernaturalism into the realm of the mind. Why is this an excellent definition of the supernatural? I refer you to Richard Carrier for the full argument. But consider: Suppose that you discover what seems to be a spirit, inhabiting a tree: a dryad who can materialize outside or inside the tree, who speaks in English about the need to protect her tree, et cetera. And then suppose that we turn a microscope on this tree spirit, and she turns out to be made of parts—not inherently spiritual and ineffable parts, like fabric of desireness and cloth of belief; but rather the same sort of parts as quarks and electrons, parts whose behavior is defined in motions rather than minds. Wouldn’t the dryad immediately be demoted to the dull catalogue of common things?
Based on his post eventually insisting on the a priori incoherence of such possibilities (we look inside the dryad and find out he’s not made of dull quarks), I inferred that he thought fundamentally mental things, too, are excluded a priori. You seem to now disagree, as I do. Is that right?
Reductionism, as I understand it, is the idea that the higher levels are completely explained by (are completely determined by) the lower levels. Any fundamentally new type of particle found would just be added to what we consider “lower level”.
Oh! Certainly. But this doesn’t seem to exclude “mind”, or some element thereof, from being irreducible—which is what Eliezer was trying to argue, right? He’s trying to support reductionism, and this seems to include an attack on “fundamentally mental” entities. Based on what you’re saying, though, there could be a fundamental type of particle, called “feelions,” or “qualions”—the entities responsible for what we call “mind”—which would not reduce down to quarks, and therefore would deserve to be called their own fundamental type of “stuff.” It’s a bit weird to me to call this a reductionist theory, and its certainly not a reductionist materialist theory.
Everything else you said seems to me right on—emergent properties that are irreducible to their constituents in principle seems somewhat incoherent to me.
QM possesses some fundamental level of complexity, but I wouldn’t agree in this context that it’s “fundamentally complicated”.
I see what you mean. It’s certainly a good distinction to make, even if it’s difficult to articulate. Again, though, I think it’s Occam’s Razor and induction that makes us prefer the simpler entities—they aren’t the sole inhabitants of the territory by default.
Indeed, an irreducible entity (albeit with describable, predictable, behavior) is not much better than a miracle. This is why Occam’s Razor, insisting that our model of the world should not postulate needless entities, insists that everything should be reduced to one type of stuff if possible. But the “if possible” is key: we verify through inference and induction whether or not it’s reasonable to think we’ll be able to reduce everything, not through a priori logic.
That said, I wonder if the claim can’t be near-equivalently rephrased “it’s impossible to imagine a non-reductionist scenario without populating it with your own arbitrary fictions”.
Ah, that’s very interesting. Now we’re getting somewhere.
I don’t think it has to be arbitrary. Couldn’t the following scenario be the case?:
The universe is full of entities that experiments show reducible to fundamental elements with laws (say, quarks), or entities that induction + parsimony tells us ought to be reducible to fundamental elements (since these entities are made of quarks, we just haven’t quite figured out the reduction of their emergent properties yet)… BUT there is one exception in this universe, a certain type of stuff whose behavior is quantifiable, yet not reducible to quarks. In fact, we have no reason to believe this certain type of stuff is even made of the fundamental stuff everything else seems to be. Every experiment would defy reducing this entity down to quarks, to the point that it would actually be against Occam’s Razor to try and reduce this entity to quarks! It would be a type of dualism, I suppose. It’s not a priori logically excluded, and it’s not arbitrary.
Of course it’s technically possible that the territory will play a game of supernatural and support a fundamental object behaving according to a high-level concept in your mind. But this is improbable to an extent of being impossible, a priori, without need for further experiments to drive the certainty to absolute.
Not quite sure what you’re saying here. If you’re saying:
1)”Entities in the map will not magically jump into the territory,” Then I never disagreed with this. What I disagreed with is your labeling certain things as obviously in the map and others obviously in the territory. We can use whatever labels you like: I still don’t know why irreducible entities in the territory are “incredibly improbable prior to any empirical evidence.”
2)”The territory can’t support irreducible entities,” you still haven’t asserted why this is “incredibly improbable prior to any empirical evidence.”
To loqi and Nesov:
Again, both of your responses seem to hinge on the fact that my challenge below is easily answerable, and has already been answered:
Tell me the obvious, a priori logically necessary criteria for a person to distinguish between “entities within the territory” and “high-level concepts.” If you can’t give any, then this is a big problem: you don’t know that the higher level entities aren’t within the territory. They could be within the territory, or they could be “computational abstractions.” Either position is logically tenable, so it makes no sense to say that this is where the logical incoherence comes in.
To loqi: Where do we draw the line? Where is an entity too complex to be considered fundamental, whereas another is somewhat less complex and can therefore be considered simple? What would be a priori illogical about every entity in the universe being explainable in terms of quarks, except for one type of entity, which simply followed different laws? (Maybe these laws wouldn’t even be deterministic, but that’s apparently not a knockdown criticism of them, right? From what I understand, QM isn’t deterministic, by some interpretations.)
To Nesov: Again, you’re presupposing that you know what’s part of the territory, and what’s part of the map, and then saying “obviously, the territory isn’t affected by the map.” Sure. But this presupposes the territory doesn’t have any irreducible entities. It doesn’t demonstrate it.
Don’t get me wrong: Occam’s razor will indeed (and rightly) push us to suspect that there are no irreducible entities. But it will do this based on some previous success with reduction—it is an inference, not an a priori necessity.
This doesn’t really answer the question, though. I know that a priori means “prior to experience”, but what does this consist of? Originally, for something to be “a priori illogical”, it was supposed to mean that it couldn’t be thought without contradicting oneself, because of pre-experiential rules of thought. An example would be two straight lines on a flat surface forming a bounded figure—it’s not just wrong, but inconceivable. As far as I can tell, an irreducible entity doesn’t possess this inconceivability, so I’m trying to figure out what Eliezer meant.
(He mentions some stuff about being unable to make testable predictions to confirm irreducibility, but as I’ve already said, this seems to presuppose that reducibility is the default position, not prove it.)
That was a bit confusing, and I have to go now, so I’ll try and give a more thorough response later. I’ll just say right now that I don’t think it’s as easy as you claim to differentiate between “higher-level” and “lower-level” entities/concepts/laws, or rather, to decide whether an entity is actually a fundamental thing with laws, or whether its just a concept. You appeal to changeability, but this seems like unsteady ground.
EDIT: Here’s a better way of formulating my objection: tell me the obvious, a priori logically necessary criteria for a person to distinguish between “entities within the territory” and “high-level concepts.” If you can’t give any, then this is a big problem: you don’t know that the higher level entities aren’t within the territory. They could be within the territory, or they could be “computational abstractions.” Either position is logically tenable, so it makes no sense to say that this is where the logical incoherence comes in.
I happen to agree. However, the claim of reductionism is that what you’ve described is the case for ALL entities. I’m trying to figure out why this claim is logically necessary, and any disagreement is a confusion.
Haha if I just downvoted it, then I wouldn’t be able to explain what I do mean.
I’m simply attempting to disagree with the logical necessity of reductionism. I said this earlier, I thought it was pretty clear:
My contention is that it’s possible to reduce the levels, but not logically necessary—and I support this contention with the fact that we don’t necessarily collapse the levels in our reasoning, and we can’t collapse the levels in our imagination.
So, the fact that a painting has a subject is a good example of this: I can’t imagine the specific differences between a) the quark-configuration that would lead to me believing its “about a subject”, versus b) the quark-configuration that would lead to me believing its just a blob. I can believe that quarks are ultimately responsible, but I’m not obligated to do so by a priori logical necessity.
So I’m not contending anything about what the most fundamental level is. I’m just saying that non-reductionism isn’t inconceivable.
Could you explain? If I were presented with a data sheet full of numbers, and told “these are the point coordinates of the fundamental building blocks of three entities. Please tell me what these entities are, and if applicable, what they are about” I would be unable to do so. Would you?
Thus I agree with this statement as it is written, because I think the difference in the subjects of the paintings are found instead in the thoughts of the beholder. Would you say that there is a legitimate difference between the thought that a painting has a subject and the thought that a painting is just random blobs?
But surely there’s something in the painting that is causing the observer to have different thoughts for different subjects. But that something in the painting is not anything discernible on the level of quarks. This is why I brought the example up, after all. It was in response to:
if the boring old normal model is correct, your brain is made of quarks, and so your brain will only be able to envision and concretely predict things that can predicted by quarks.
I believe (I could be wrong, since I started this thread asking for a clarification) that the implication of this statement (derived from the context) was that “brains made of quarks can’t think about things as if they’re irreducibly not made of quarks.”
First of all, saying “brains made of quarks can’t think [blank] because quarks themselves aren’t [blank],” seems to me equivalent to saying that paintings can’t be about something because quarks can’t be about something. It’s confusing the abilities and properties of one level for those of another. I know this is a stretch, but be generous, because I think the parallelism is important.
Second of all, we think about things as if they’re not quarks all the time. We can “predict” or “envision” the subject of the painting without thinking about the quark coordinates at all (and such coordinates would not help us envision or predict anything to do with the subject).
So I clearly need some help understanding what Eliezer actually meant. I find no reason to believe that brains made of quarks can’t think about things as if they’re not made of quarks. (Or rather, Eliezer only seems to allow this if it’s a “confusion.” I don’t understand what he means by this.)
The two computer screens depicting completely different subjects have almost everything in common, in that they are of the same material. However, where they differ—namely, the color of each pixel—is where all the information about the painting is contained. So the screens have enough different information (at the quark level) to distinguish what the paintings are about.
But the two screens with two different subjects are probably more similar than a screen and a painting with the same subject, in terms of coordinates of quarks. Additionally, it’s not clear to me that there’s a one-to-one correspondence between color and quarks. Even establishing a correspondence between color and chemical make up is extremely difficult, due to the influence of natural selection in how we see color (I remember Dennett having a cool chapter on this in CE.)
I don’t want to make our disagreement sound more stark than it actually is. I agree that the about-ness is in the mind of the beholder, and the stick figure is a good example as well… but I think this just emphasizes my point. Let me put it this way: Given the data for the point-coordinates of the three entities, could a mind choose which one had which subject? No, even though the criteria is buried abstrusely somewhere in there. The point being that the models are inextricably separate in the imagination, and its therefore not clear to me why its a priori logically necessary that they all collapse into the same territory (though I agree that they do, ultimately).
I’m having the same difficulty. Aren’t quarks (or whatever is the most elemental bit of matter) fundamentally complicated? What’s meant by “complicated”?
(Sorry for being so chatty.)
Well, wouldn’t a painting of the Mona Lisa, and a computer screen depicting said painting, have very different quarks, and quark patterns? While two computer screens depicting some completely different subject would be much more similar to each other? This is what I was trying to get at.
Certainly—that was somewhat sloppy of me. In my defense, however, a priori and conceivability/imaginability are pretty inextricably tied. Additionally, you yourself used the word “envision.”
your brain will only be able to envision...
It would perhaps be helpful if you could clarify what you meant when you said:
If you can’t come up with a good answer to that, it’s not observation that’s ruling out “non-reductionist” beliefs, but a priori logical incoherence.
Your usage doesn’t seem to fit into the Kantian sense of the term—the unity of my experience of the world is not conditioned by everything being reducible. What do you mean when you say irreducibility is a priori logically incoherent?
The author seems to assert that this is a cultural phenomenon. I wonder if our attempts at unifying into a theory might not be instinctive, however. Would it then be so obvious that Moral Realism were false? We have an innate demand for consistency in our moral principles, that might allow us to say something like “racism is indeed objectively wrong, IF you believe that happiness is good.”
That being said, I don’t think it’s enough to save moral realism. The probability that moral realism is false has been a disturbing prospect for me lately, so I’m curious how he carves out a comfortable alternative.