Phil_Goetz2

Karma: 62

Phil_Goetz2 Mar 30, 2008, 4:08 AM
7 points
on: Hand vs. Fingers
I’m confused as to what your purpose is with this series on reductionism. Is there a particular anti-reductionist position you’re combating?

Earlier, you wrote,

Reductionism is not a positive belief, but rather, a disbelief that the higher levels of simplified multilevel models are out there in the territory.
I don’t think your typical anti-reductionist is concerned about the existence of different levels of models. I’ve never heard one ask “How can you model the plane without the wings?”

Anti-reductionists are opposed to models in general. An anti-reductionist believes that a collection of things has properties that are not the results of the combined properties of the things in the collection, let alone of a model. For example, they would say that a human has free will, even though the constituents of the human are deterministic; or that a human has a soul, but if you constructed a human from parts, it wouldn’t; or that representations in a human brain have meaning, while representations in a computer cannot; or that a human brain has consciousness, etc.

So I don’t think what you’re writing addresses what it is that reductionists believe, that non-reductionists don’t believe.

Anti-reductionism equals spiritualism, and it is not the opposite of materialism, but of science. Science is not materialistic, since we believe in fields. Also, if you discovered that spirits were composed of magnetic fields, and conducted experiments on them, you would still be a scientist. The spiritualist, by contrast, uses the term “spirit” to name something that can’t be explained. Anti-reductionism = spiritualism = the belief that there exist complex phenomena (“spirits”) with no explanations.

Phil_Goetz2 Mar 30, 2008, 2:43 AM
1 point
on: Initiation Ceremony
Tim, one-tenth would be the correct answer if Brennan were in the Heresy of Virtue, AND there were 16 people in the room. There would be 9 women in the HoV in the room, and 1 man who wasn’t Brennan; hence, one in ten.

Thanks to Mike Vassar for pointing out that, if Brennan is in the HoV, you need to count how many men are in the room.

Since there are an odd number of people in the room, the guide must be posing a hypothetical question. If Brennan is in the HoV, the correct answer would be for him to say that he needs to know how many people are in the room in the hypothetical situation.

Phil_Goetz2 Mar 29, 2008, 2:31 PM
1 point
on: Initiation Ceremony
Hint for the extra credit: What is the probability that the guide is Brennan? (Zero.)

Phil_Goetz2 Mar 29, 2008, 5:29 AM
3 points
on: Initiation Ceremony
In my experience, the problem with running on curiousity is that, to be effective at something, one has to not take the time to investigate lots of unrelated things one is curious about.

Phil_Goetz2 Mar 29, 2008, 4:16 AM
−4 points
on: Initiation Ceremony
For extra credit, explain how “one-tenth” could also have been the correct answer.

Phil_Goetz2 Mar 18, 2008, 4:47 PM
11 points
on: Fake Reductionism
This reminds me of a lesson that I learned, I’m embarrassed to admit, from Tom Brown Jr. (who later threw me out of his school for trying to verify his autobiographical claims).

If you’re walking through the woods with a child, and they’re interested in all the different plants that they see, they’ll ask you what each one is. And, often, they lose interest in each plant after you tell them its name. They still don’t know anything about the plant, but they think they do, and it’s no longer mysterious and exciting to them.

This is the fault of the child, not the fault of the person who gave the plant its name.