[extropy-chat] Reductionism

[Samantha Atkins]

Eliezer Yudkowsky wrote:

> Samantha Atkins wrote:
>
>> I do not agree with your reductionism.  I don't agree that everything 
>> real is fully reducible to physics unless much of what is meaningful 
>> to critters like us is lost in the process.   In particular I don't 
>> believe that lack of having come up with a test for "free will" means 
>> that the existence of free will is in doubt.   I don't believe that 
>> all that is real or important can be reduced to "testable physical 
>> predicates".
>
>
> John Keats:
>
> "Do not all charms fly
>  At the touch of cold philosophy?
>  Philosophy will clip an Angel's wings,
>  Conquer all mysteries by rule and line,
>  Empty the haunted air, and gnomed mine–
>  Unweave a rainbow...”
>
> I think that most of the emotional problems with reductionism arise 
> from failure to *see* why the reduction works, and instead being only 
> *told* that it works.  Someone may have told Keats that Newton 
> explained the rainbow, but I doubt Keats ever studied the math.  
> Suppose that instead of reading that entire, careful mathematical 
> explanation of Bayes' Theorem and how it relates to rationality, you 
> knew only that the marvelous miracle of Reason was reducible to a mere 
> couple of equations, seemingly meaningless on the page.  How sad; and 
> it seemed so wonderful up until then.
>

What makes you think I was giving evidence of an "emotional problem" 
with this sort of reductionism?  Let me go at a subpart of this from a 
slightly different angle.   If given that you do not have such a useful 
physical test for what is commonly referred to as "free will" and thus 
doubt its existence, what does this actually gain for you?   If you 
actually started treating people and situations as if free will was 
nonexistent would this make you more capable in interactions with people 
or less so?   More generally, the formal foundations of many types of 
assumptions and tools we use every day often lags the usefulness of 
those tools and assumptions and may in fact never be done.   We would be 
foolish and somewhat boorish to take every opportunity to heap scorn on 
all such as we do not have good formalisms and proofs for them.   It is 
true enough that we can and should leave rooms for doubt concerning them 
or their actual meaning, explanation and inter-relatedness as we 
obviously do not understand them fully.

As has been brought out many times here reducing all things to physics 
does not make all things more understandable.   Some things lose much of 
their menaing when such a reduction is applied.   This doesn't mean they 
were meaningless.  It means one is using the wrong tools or at the wrong 
level of focus for the task at hand.

> To know and understand and see how Bayesian reasoning explains 
> rationality is to explain rationality; to be merely *told* that 
> Bayesian reasoning explains rationality is to *explain away* 
> rationality.  There is a difference between explaining, and explaining 
> away.
>
I have no problem with this instance of explanation or most real versus 
forced explanations.

>
> > Furthermore, I don't believe that you fully and consistently believe
> > this either.
>
> Them's fighting words, Samantha.
>

By this I mean that you too make and must make use of various tools and 
assumptions that you cannot fully reduce in order to function at all in 
the world.    There is no need to fight over an obvious truth.  :-)

- samantha