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Less Wrong: Reductionism

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:

  • 35 articles written by Eliezer Yudkowsky
  • 5.3 hours of audio narrated by George Thomas

Note: Due to its abundant use of math, this package excludes the article The Quotation is not the Referent.


Joy In The Merely Real

Play f114902fd0cfda50800be7fbb69752c4badad535050adaaeb6927f96d31eb7c8

  1. Dissolving The Question

    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?

  2. Wrong Questions

    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.

  3. Righting A Wrong Question

    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.

  4. Mind Projection Fallacy

    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.

  5. Probability Is In The Mind

    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.

  6. [Omitted] The Quotation Is Not The Referent

    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.

  7. Qualitatively Confused

    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.

  8. Qualitatively Confused

    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.

  9. Explaining Vs. Explaining Away

    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.

  10. Fake Reductionism

    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.

  11. Savanna Poets

    "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.

  12. Joy In The Merely Real

    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.

  13. Joy In Discovery

    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.

  14. Bind Yourself To Reality

    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.

  15. If You Demand Magic, Magic Won't Help

    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.

  16. Mundane Magic

    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".

  17. The Beauty Of Settled Science

    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.

  18. Amazing Breakthrough Day: April 1st

    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.

  19. Is Humanism A Religion Substitute?

    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.

  20. Scarcity

    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.

  21. To Spread Science, Keep It Secret

    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).

  22. Initiation Ceremony

    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?

  23. Awww, A Zebra

    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."

  24. Hand Vs. Fingers

    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.

  25. Angry Atoms

    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.

  26. Heat Vs. Motion

    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.

  27. Brain Breakthrough! It's Made Of Neurons!

    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.

  28. Reductive Reference

    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.

  29. Zombies! Zombies?

    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).

  30. Zombie Responses

    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.

  31. The Generalized Anti Zombie Principle

    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.

  32. Gazp Vs. Glut

    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.

  33. Belief In The Implied Invisible

    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?

  34. Zombies: The Movie

    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.

  35. Excluding The Supernatural

    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.

  36. Psychic Powers

    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.