There's a lot of discussion in the comments about whether or not it's rationally ok to feel less happy in a reductive world.
Eliezer doesn't emphasize this in his post, but in retrospect it seems that what's wrong with Keats' line of thinking isn't the actual feeling sad about rainbows being explained, it's the mind projection fallacy of thinking that this must be true for everyone. Hence we get arguments like, if atoms are all that there is then nothing means anything and everything is miserable oh woe are us! Which is poppycock. Maybe it makes you feel that way, but it certainly doesn't make me feel that way. I think being made of starstuff is absolutely wondrous.
Reading through this was a form of nerd sniping for me, and so now I'm reading through the wikipedia article on Rainbows so I can understand why they form arcs of a circle and other details. Not sure if I'm happy or not about that yet.
It's actually really quite neat when you finally understand all the component ideas and how they work to create the rainbow. The other day I was driving my car and noticed that the conditions were right for a rainbow, and when I looked in the correct direction, there it was. It was pretty satisfying!
Today's post, Fake Reductionism was originally published on 17 March 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):
There is a very great distinction between being able to see where the rainbow comes from, and playing around with prisms to confirm it, and maybe making a rainbow yourself by spraying water droplets, versus some dour-faced philosopher just telling you, "No, there's nothing special about the rainbow. Didn't you hear? Scientists have explained it away. Just something to do with raindrops or whatever. Nothing to be excited about." I think this distinction probably accounts for a hell of a lot of the deadly existential emptiness that supposedly accompanies scientific reductionism.
Discuss the post here (rather than in the comments to the original post).
This post is part of the Rerunning the Sequences series, where we'll be going through Eliezer Yudkowsky's old posts in order so that people who are interested can (re-)read and discuss them. The previous post was Explaining vs. Explaining Away, and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.
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