Need more information? Our frequently asked questions may have the information you're looking for.
If you ever need need a hand, you can always contact us.
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. It’s written by Eliezer Yudkowsky and includes two subsequences: Joy in the Merely Real and Zombies.
This Channel Includes:
Note: Due to its abundant use of math, this package excludes the article The Quotation is not the Referent.
The philosopher's instinct is to find the most defensible position, publish it, and move on. But the "naive" view, the instinctive view, is a fact about human psychology. You can prove that free will is impossible until the Sun goes cold, but this leaves an unexplained fact of cognitive science: If free will doesn't exist, what goes on inside the head of a human being who thinks it does?
And no, I don't know the answer to that last one. But I can guess one thing, based on my previous experience with unanswerable questions. The answer will not consist of some grand triumphant First Cause.
Q: Why am I confused by the question "Do you have free will?"? A: Because I don't know what "free will" really means. Q: Why don't I know what "free will" means? A: Because there is no clear explanation of it using words. It's an intuitive concept. It's a feeling.
Exactly. I never conceived of the alien taking the woman because she was attractive. Weaker perhaps, but not because he found her sexy. Damsel in distress. I think it is your, author of this article, who suffered from mind projection fallacy, not necessarily the creators of the comic or the rest of the audience.
Followup to: The Mind Projection Fallacy Yesterday I spoke of the Mind Projection Fallacy, giving the example of the alien monster who carries off a girl in a torn dress for intended ravishing-a mistake which I imputed to the artist's tendency to think that a woman's sexiness is a property of the woman herself, woman.sexiness, rather than something that exists in the mind of an observer, and probably wouldn't exist in an alien mind.
Followup to: The Mind Projection Fallacy, Probability is in the Mind In classical logic, the operational definition of identity is that whenever 'A=B' is a theorem, you can substitute 'A' for 'B' in any theorem where B appears.
So let's use quantitative reasoning instead. Suppose that I assign a 70% probability to the proposition that snow is white. It follows that I think there's around a 70% chance that the sentence "snow is white" will turn out to be true.
Specific non-reductionist hypotheses, in the extremely unlikely event that any are supported by evidence, could cast doubt on reductionism. We'd need to find a specific set of circumstances under which reality appears to be computing the same entities at multiple levels simultaneously and applying different laws at each level, or we'd need to find fundamental laws that talk about non-fundamental objects.
Followup to: Reductionism, Righting a Wrong Question John Keats's (1819) surely deserves some kind of award for Most Famously Annoying Poetry: ...Do not all charms fly At the mere touch of cold philosophy? There was an awful rainbow once in heaven: We know her woof, her texture; she is given In the dull catalogue of common things.
Reduction of perception is the only way we can process the incoming sense data. Reduction of conception is the only way we can think about and understand that data. Reductionism is the inevitable consequence of any attempt to understand the world - breaking the world down into discrete parts that can be understood on their own terms, instead of trying to deal with an effectively infinite system of inestimable complexity.
"Poets say science takes away from the beauty of the stars-mere globs of gas atoms. Nothing is "mere". I too can see the stars on a desert night, and feel them. But do I see less or more? "The vastness of the heavens stretches my imagination-stuck on this carousel my little eye can catch one-million-year-old light.
Psy-Kosh, I've already thought about that. Suppose the "ruleless" thing is picking a series of zeros and ones. There is no theorem of mathematics that as the series goes to infinity, there must exist a limit of the percentage of zeros and ones.
The really uncharitable reading is that the joy of first discovery is about status. Competition. Scarcity. Beating everyone else to the punch. It doesn't matter whether you have a 3-room house or a 4-room house, what matters is having a bigger house than the Joneses.
Followup to: Joy in the Merely Real So perhaps you're reading all this, and asking: "Yes, but what does this have to do with reductionism?" Partially, it's a matter of leaving a line of retreat. It's not easy to take something important apart into components, when you're convinced that this removes magic from the world, unweaves the rainbow.
Now here's the question-and yes, it is a little unkind, but I think it needs to be asked: Presumably most readers of these novels see themselves in the protagonist's shoes, fantasizing about their own acquisition of sorcery. Wishing for magic. And, barring improbable demographics, most readers of these novels are not scientists.
Nothing can oppose the Ultimate Power except the Ultimate Power. Any less-than-ultimate Power will simply be "comprehended" by the Ultimate and disrupted in some inconceivable fashion, or even absorbed into the Ultimates' own power base. For this reason the Ultimate Power is sometimes called the "master technique of techniques" or the "trump card that trumps all other trumps".
Facts do not need to be unexplainable, to be beautiful; truths do not become less worth learning, if someone else knows them; beliefs do not become less worthwhile, if many others share them... ...and if you only care about scientific issues that are controversial, you will end up with a head stuffed full of garbage.
So you're thinking, "April 1st... isn't that already supposed to be April Fool's Day?" Yes-and that will provide the ideal cover for celebrating Amazing Breakthrough Day. As I argued in " The Beauty of Settled Science", it is a major problem that media coverage of science focuses only on breaking news.
Followup to: Bind Yourself to Reality For many years before the Wright Brothers, people dreamed of flying with magic potions. There was nothing irrational about the raw desire to fly. There was nothing tainted about the wish to look down on a cloud from above. Only the "magic potions" part was irrational.
What follows is taken primarily from Robert Cialdini's Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion. I own three copies of this book, one for myself, and two for loaning to friends. S carcity, as that term is used in social psychology, is when things become more desirable as they appear less obtainable.
Insightful, as always, but this seems like it may have the esoteric value of some knowledge the wrong way around. There are certain questions, like "What is the meaning of life?" that science cannot answer the way people want to hear (as, "that questions is incoherent and pointless" is rarely viewed as satisfactory, regardless of its accuracy).
I probably would have gotten the answer, but it wouldn't have occurred to me to say that the initial information was wrong. It's part of an initiation ritual for a mathematical cult; why would anyone bother checking to see if the actual numbers are correct?
Me: "But I'm looking at the zebra!" Her: " On a computer!" Me: (Turns away, hides face.) Her: "Have you ever even seen a zebra in real life?" Me: "Yes! Yes, I have! My parents took me to Lincoln Park Zoo! ...man, I hated that place."
The theme here is that, if you can see how (not just know that) a higher level reduces to a lower one, they will not seem like separate things within your map; you will be able to see how silly it is to think that your fingers could be in one place, and your hand somewhere else; you will be able to see how silly it is to argue about whether it is your hand picks up the cup, or your fingers.
All this is still tremendously oversimplified, but it should, at least, reduce the apparent length of the gap. If you can understand all that, you can see how a planner built out of base matter can be influenced by alcohol to output more angry behaviors.
First, you could suppose that heat and motion exist separately-that the caloric theory is correct-but that among our universe's physical laws is a "bridging law" which states that, where objects are moving quickly, caloric will come into existence.
In an amazing breakthrough, a multinational team of scientists led by Nobel laureate Santiago Ramón y Cajal announced that the brain is composed of a ridiculously complicated network of tiny cells connected to each other by infinitesimal threads and branches.
Sadi Carnot formulated the (precursor to) the second law of thermodynamics using the caloric theory of heat, in which heat was just a fluid that flowed from hot things to cold things, produced by fire, making gases expand-the effects of heat were studied separately from the science of kinetics, considerably before the reduction took place.
Let's suppose the above is correct; as a postulate, it should certainly present no problem for advocates of zombies. Even if humans are not like this, it seems easy enough to imagine an AI constructed this way (and imaginability is what the zombie argument is all about).
The gap between "I don't see a contradiction yet" and "this is logically possible" is so huge (it's NP-complete even in some simple-seeming cases) that you really should have two different words.
If we allow that the Anti-Zombie Argument applies against the Off-Switch, then the Generalized Anti-Zombie Principle does not say only, "Any change that is not in-principle experimentally detectable (IPED) cannot remove your consciousness." The switch's flipping is experimentally detectable, but it still seems highly unlikely to remove your consciousness.
Now this is not standard philosophical procedure for thought experiments. In standard philosophical procedure, you are allowed to postulate things like "Suppose you were riding a beam of light..." without worrying about physical possibility, let alone mere improbability.
Which they had better not do! One of the lessons of history is that what-we-call-reality keeps turning out to be bigger and bigger and huger yet. Remember when the Earth was at the center of the universe? Remember when no one had invented Avogadro's number?
It's possible Eliezer's rhetorical style is tripping you up (although if you've read much else of his it shouldn't), but personally I think putting this argument in movie script form makes it much more accessible to lay-people.
If we're going over the archeological records to test the assertion that Jehovah parted the Red Sea out of an explicit desire to display its superhuman power, then it makes little difference whether Jehovah is ontologically basic, or an alien with nanotech, or a Dark Lord of the Matrix.
Hence the actual discovery of psychic powers would imply that the human-naive Occam rule was in fact better-calibrated than the sophisticated naturalistic Occam rule. It would argue that reductionists had been wrong all along in trying to take apart the brain; that what our minds exposed as a seemingly simple lever, was in fact a simple lever.