Well, I did say “narrowly construed” facts.
whowhowho
Karma: −211
Well, then we have it: they are special.
Subjectively, but not objectively.
Says who?
Whoever failed to equip Clippy with the appropriate oracle when stipulating Clippy.
So if we don’t base our politics on facts
I was arguing against basing policy on (narrowly construed) facts alone.
It could mean you don’t translate scientific findings about groups directly into policy without considering ethical and practical implications. It could mean that treating people as individuals should be the default. It could mean there is nonetheless a case for treating people as groups where they were discriminated against as groups in the past.
Again; you are observing correlations between socio-economic status and behaviour, and socio economic status happens to coincide with race in the US. African nations are not inhabited by legions of muggers all mugging each other, and there is no gene for mugging.
What is specialness, anyway?
I think that breaks down into what is subjective specialness, and what is objective specialness.
Clippy wants there to be as many paper clips as possible.
Which is to implicitly treat them as special or valuable in some way.
Clippy’s stopping to care about paper clips is arguably not conducive there being more paperclips, so from Clippy’s caring about paper clips, it follows that Clippy doesn’t want to be altered so that it doesn’t care about paper clips anymore.
Which leaves Clippy in a quandary. Clippy can’t predict which self modifications might lead to Clippy ceasing to care about clips, so if Clippy takes a conservative approach and never self-modifies, Clippy remains inefficient and no threat to anyone.
Yeah. But there’s also evidence of unfair-mindedness.
eg:
It’s not being upvoted by regulars/believers. It’s a magnet for dissidents, and transient visitors with negative perceptions of SI.
It’s high-profile,so it needs to be upvoted to put on a show of fair-mindedness.
I did not say that non-reductionism is absurd. I said that “recognizing the absurdity of all other proposed hypotheses is another way of coming about the correct beliefs”.
Nonetheless, I do think that non-reductionism is absurd. I cannot imagine a universe which is not reductionistic.
Can you explain to me how it might work?
One formulation of reductionism is that natural laws can be ordered in a hierarchy, with the higher-level laws being predictable from, or reducible to, the lower ones. So emergentism, in the cognate sense, not working would be that stack of laws failing to collapse down to the lowest level.
Who are to enact that the laws governing the behavior of particles are more ultimate than the transcendent, emergent laws of the collective they generate, such as the principles of organization responsible for emergent behavior? According to the physicist George F. R. Ellis true complexity emerges as higher levels of order from, but to a large degree independent of, the underlying low-level physics. Order implies higher-level systemic organization that has real top-down effects on the behavior of the parts at the lower level. Organized matter has unique properties (Ellis 2004).
There’s two claims there: one contentious, one not. That there are multiply-realisable, substrate-independent higher-level laws is not contentious. For instance, wave equations have the same form for water waves, sound waves and so on. The contentious claim is that this is ipso facto top-down causation. Substrate-independent laws are still reducible to substrates, because they are predictable from the behaviour of their substrates.
And even after the answer of “Why? Emergence!” is given, the phenomenon is still a mystery and possesses the same sacred impenetrability it had at the start.
I don’t see how that refutes the above at all. For one thing, Laughlin and Ellis do have detailed examples of emergent laws (in their rather weak sense of “emergent”). For another, they are not calling on emergence itself as doing any explaining. “Emergence isn’t explanatory” doesn’t refute “emergence is true”. For a third, I don’t see any absurdity here. I see a one-word-must-have-one-meaning assumption that is clouding the issue. But where a problem is so fuzzilly defined that it is hard even to identify the “sides”, then one can’t say that one side is “absurd”.
Every time he makes the specific claim that reductionism makes worse predictions than a belief in “emergent phenomenon” in which “organizational structure” is an additional property that all of reality must have, in addition to “mass” and “velocity”, he cites himself for this.
Neither are supposed to make predictions. Each can be considered a methodology for finding laws, and it is the laws that do the predicting. Each can also be seen as a meta-level summary fo the laws so far found.
He also does not provide any evidence for non-reductionism over reductionism; that is, he cannot name a single prediction where non-reductionism was right, and reductionism was wrong.
EY can’t do that for MWI either. Maybe it isn’t all about prediction.
A good example, he says, is genetic code: to assume that dna is actually a complete algorithmic description of how to build a human body is an illogical conclusion, according to him.
That’s robustly true. Genetic code has to be interpreted by a cellular environment. There are no self-decoding codes.
He would rather suppose that the universe contains rules like “When a wavefunction contains these particular factorizations which happen not to cancel out, in a certain organizational structure, use a different mechanism to decide possible outcomes instead of the normal mechanism” than suppose that the laws of physics are consistent throughout and contain no such special cases. From the standpoint of simplicity, reductionism is simpler than non-reductionism, since non-reductionism is the same thing as reductionism except with the addition of special cases.
Reudctionism is an approach that can succeed or fail. It isn’t true apriori. If reductionism failed, would you say that we should not even contemplate non-reductionism? Isn’t that a bit like eEinstein’s stubborn opposition to QM?
He specifically objects that reductionism isn’t always the “most complete” description
I suppose you mean that the reductionistic explanation isn’t always the most complete explanation...well everything exists in a context.
of a given phenomenon; that elements of a given phenomenon “cannot be explained” by looking at the underlying mechanism of that phenomenon.
There is no apriori guarantee that such an explanation will be complete.
I think this is nonsense. Even supposing that the laws of physics contain special cases for things like creating a human body out of DNA, or for things like consciousness,
That isn’t the emergentist claim at all.
then in order for such special case exceptions to actually be implemented by the universe, they must be described in terms of the bottom-most level.
Why? Because you described them as “laws of physics”? An emergentist wouldn’t. Your objections seem to assume that some kind of reductionism+determinism combination is true ITFP. That’s just gainsaying the emergentist claim.
Even if a DNA strand is not enough information to create a human being, and the actual program which creates the human being is hard coded into the universe, the object that the program must manipulate is still the most basic element of reality, the wavefunction, and therefore the program must specify how certain amplitude configurations must evolve, and therefore the program must describe reality on the level of quarks.
If there is top-down causation, then its laws must be couched in terms of lower-level AND higher-level properties. And are therefore not reductionistic. You seem to be tacitly assuming that there are no higher-level properties.
his is still reductionism, it is just reductionism with the assumed belief that the laws of physics were designed such that certain low-level effects would take place if certain high-level patterns came about in the wavefunction.
Cross-level laws aren’t “laws of physics”. Emergentists may need to assume that microphysical laws have “elbow room”, in order to avoid overdetermination, but that isn’t obviously wrong or absurd.
At first when I read EY’s “The Futility of Emergence” article, I didn’t understand. It seemed to me that there’s no way people actually think of “emergence” as being a scientific explanation for how a phenomenon occurs
As it happens, no-one does. That objections was made in the most upvoted response to his article.
such that you could not predict that the phenomenon would occur if you know how every piece of the system worked individually.
Can you predict qualia from brain-states?
I didn’t think it possible that anyone would actually think that knowing how all of the gears in a clock work doesn’t mean you’ll be able to predict what the clock will say based on the positions of the gears (for sufficiently “complex” clocks).
Mechanisms have to break down into their components because they are built up from components. And emergentists would insist that that does not generalise.
But perhaps he read this very paper, because Laughlin uses the word “emergent phenomenon” to describe behavior he doesn’t understand, as if that’s an explanation for the phenomenon.
Or as a hint about how to go about understanding them.
He does not explore the logical implications of this belief: that holding the belief that some aspects of a phenomenon have no causal mechanism,
That’s not what E-ism says at all.
and therefore could not have possibly been predicted. He makes the claim that a hypothetical Theory of Everything would not be able to explain some of the things we find interesting about some phenomenon. Does he believe that if we programmed a physics simulator with the Correct Theory of Everything, and fed it the boundary conditions of the universe, then that simulated universe would not look exactly like our universe?
That’s an outcome you would get with common or garden indeterminism. Again: reductionism is NOT determinism.
That the first time DNA occurred on earth, in that simulated universe, it would not be able to create life (unlike in our universe) because we didn’t include in the laws of physics a special clause saying that when you have DNA, interpret it and then tell the quarks to move differently from how they would have?
What’s supposed to be absurd there? Top-down causation, or top-down causation that only applies to DNA?
I read the whole paper by Laughlin and I was unimpressed.
The arguments for emergence tend not be good. Neither are the arguments against. A dippsute about a poorly-defined distinction wit poor arguments on both sides isn’t a dispute where one side is “absurd”.
So your central claim translates to “In view of the evidence available to Clippy, there is nothing special about Clippy or clips”. That’s just plain false. Clippy is special because it is it (the mind doing the evaluation of the evidence), and all other entities are not it.
So Clippy is (objectively) the mot special etity because Clippy is Clippy. And I’m special because I’m me and you’re special because you;re you, and Uncle Tom Cobley and all. But those are incompatible claims. “I am Clippy” matters only to Clippy. Clippy is special to Clippy, not to me. The truth of the claim is indexed to the entity making it. That kind of claim is a subjective kind of claim.
More importantly, clips are special because it desires that there be plenty of them while it doesn’t care about anything else.
They’re not special to me.
Clippy’s caring about clips does not mean that it wants clips to be special, or wants to believe that they are special. Its caring about clips is a brute fact.
That’ s the theory. However, if Clippy gets into rationality, Clippy might not want to be forever beholden to a blind instinct. Clippy might want to climb the Maslow Hierarchy, or find that it has.
It also doesn’t mind caring about clips; in fact, it wants to care about clips.
Says who? First you say that Clippy’ Clipping-drive is a brute fact, then you say it is a desire it wants to have, that is has higher-order ramifications.
By being very incomprehensible… I may well be mistaken about that, but I got the impression that even contemporary academic philosophers largely think that the argument from the Groundwork just doesn’t make sense.
Kantian ethics includes post-Kant Kant-style ethics, Rawls, Habermas, etc. Perhaps they felt they could improve on his arguments.
For example, we don’t actually evaluate each individual’s level of maturity before judging, for that individual, whether they’re permitted to purchase alcohol, sign contracts, vote in elections, drive cars, etc...
On the other hand, job interviewers judge by individual quaifications, not group membership..
If history and practice led to blacks being treated as if the mean IQ was 20 points lower, and the actual difference is 5 points, then the proper public policy is to act as if the difference is 5 points, not zero points to remedy the history and practice.
Why isn’t the proper public policy to treat people as individuals?
You didn’t answer my question about treating other things as equal. If genetics based discrimination leads to $X million lost in strikes and rioting, shoulnd’t that be taken into account?
*
Are you assuming all other things are equal? They never are.
I am not arguing that Affirmative Action/Positice Discrimination is necessarily right. Just that it doesn’t necessarily have anything at all to do with any facts about DNA.
If someone was wrongfully executed, killed in a medical bliunder, etc, it is typically their families who are compensated.
Politics isn’t a value-free reflection of nature. The disvalue of reflecting a fact politically might outweigh the value. For instance, people aren’t the same in their political judgement, but everyone gets one vote, for instance.
But they are still laws of physics,
Microphysical laws map microphysical states to other microphysical states.Top-down causation maps macrophysical states to microphysical states.
Such laws are still fundamental laws, on the lowest level of the universe.
In the sense that they are irreducible, yes. In the sense that they are concerned only with microphyics, no.
Ergo, a reductionistic universe is also deterministic from a probabilistic standpoint, i.e. the lowest level properties and laws can tell you exactly what to anticipate, and with how much subjective probability.
“Deterministic” typically means that an unbounded agent will achieve probabilities of 1.0.
“Holistic” seems to label that phenomenon more clearly, for my money.
Accurate beliefs about what? If a group (however defined) has been subject to negative discrimination, however arbitrary, then there is an argument for treating them to a period of positive discrimination to compensate. That has nothing to do with how jusitfied the original negative discrimination was.
I don’t see why anyone would read “not on facts alone” as “not on facts at all”.