ETA: I notice that the quote I linked is getting karma now even though it hasn't in a few days, yet this post isn't. That makes me think that I have gotten something wrong. I'd love to know how I've messed up.

In a response to someone being depressed about reductionism on Quora, I think that I independently derived several posts from the Reductionism sequence, and simultaneously showed how an otherwise very knowledgeable Quora user (in fact, the author of that fairly popular rationality quote that I just shared!) was wrong about whether or not 'the point at which aliveness becomes non-aliveness and vice versa exists physically,' even though I'm only (I think) like a quarter of the way through the core sequences (read in chronological order). I should say that I have no explicit idea of what a 'category' is, I think I've just seen it in conversations where people seem to be talking about philosophy. I assume that it's what we call a property that a set of objects all possess, or alternatively, the set of all objects that possess that property. I would appreciate verification on that.

I feel obliged to say that until a couple of weeks ago I was depressed by reductionism, and had been for years. Even then, it was more 'complex things are at least as cool as or cooler than/are indistinguishable from 'magical' things,' than any real understanding. (Haven't read any Heinlein, just know the quote.) This totally 'formalized' it for me.

Hi Audun. If you re-read your comment, you'll notice that you use the word 'meaning' a bunch of times, specifically wondering if 'things' 'lose it,' but you never clearly define it. Joshua, I would think of it this way, maybe our views are equivalent and I don't realize it.

'Artifacts of your perception,' like all qualia, are reducible to the neural impulses in your brain. Conversely, 'artifacts of your perception' are represented by the neural impulses in your brain. You said yourself: "Things are the way they are because of their relations to other things, not because of any inherent properties." 'Non-physical categories' exist in brains and are therefore reducible to the physical category.

I don't think that anyone is born a reductionist. Remember the time before you knew about reductionism. When you looked at something complex (in this case, 'alive'), and didn't know that it was reducible to simple parts, you felt like it was 'meaningful.' That concept and that feeling (quale) exist physically because they are reducible to neural impulses in your brain.

Now return to the present and remember what it's like for you to be a reductionist. When you look at something complex, and you know that it's reducible to simple parts, you feel like it's 'not meaningful.' That concept and that feeling also exist in your brain.

Intelligent design folks talk about 'irreducible complexity.' I'm actually not gonna talk about that at all, but I'm gonna steal and mutate their term for my own purposes because I like the words.

You were not born a reductionist. There was a time when a representation of complex things as reduced to simple parts didn't exist in your brain.

The three of us are reductionists now, so we all know that all complex things are reducible to simple parts. So there is no such thing as 'irreducible complexity.' But there is such a thing as irreduced complexity. When you learned about reductionism and started to believe it, you 'reduced' living organisms to complex systems with simple parts; that is, a new representation was created in your brain. Before that, living organisms were irreducedly complex. They could be reduced, but they had yet to be.

So, 'meaning' apparently is your word for what I have termed irreduced complexity, and it exists, like all mental things, because it exists in your brain. And you can remember what it felt like, so it still exists in your brain. You have representations for reduced complexity and irreduced complexity in your brain. Therefore, complex things are reducible to simple parts, and 'meaning' exists.

The short, sweet, simple, feel-good answer to your question is: The fact that 'magical processes' are really natural processes that are so complex that they feel like magic does not make them any less 'magical' (fucking amazing). Many reductionists use words like 'just,' and 'nothing but,' a whole lot when they talk about complex systems. Drop those words and the meanings of their sentences don't change. Reductionism doesn't make people depressed. People make reductionism depressing. They don't have to.

As it relates to the answer, 'aliveness' exists physically, but not 'somewhere in cells.' 'Aliveness' exists physically in brains. If you want to see where (when) life and non-life end and begin, then you should have someone record your brain activity when you zoom in on an arbitrary living tissue through a microscope and reach the magnification that makes you stop believing that what you see is alive.

Joshua, can you explain why the Sorites paradox is any more meaningful than the ship of Theseus?