Cognitive psychologists generally make better predicitons about human behavior than neuroscientists.
I grant you that; my assertion was one of type, not of degree. A predictive explanation will generally (yes, I am retracting my 'almost always' quantifier) be reductionist, but this a very different statement than the most reductionist explanation will be the best.
Here it seems to me like you think about philosophy as distinct from empirical reality.
Less 'distinct' and more 'abstracted'. The put it as pithy (and oversimplified) as possible, empiricism is about what is (probably) true, philosophy is about about what is (probably) necessarily true.
I could be more precise and accurate about my own thoughts here, but philosophy is one... (read more)
Mary is presumed to have all objective knowedge and only objectve knowledge, Your phrasing is ambiguous and therefire doesnt address the point.
The behavior of the neurons in her skull is an objective fact, and this is what I mean to referring to. Apologies for the ambiguity.
When you say Mary will know what happens when she sees red, do you mean she knows how red looks subjectively, or she knows something objective like what her behaviour will be
The latter. The former is purely experiential knowledge, and as I have repeatedly said is contained in a superset of verbal (what you call 'objective') knowledge, but is disjoint with the set of verbal ('objective')... (read more)
I think your post seems to have been a reply to me. I'm the one who still accepts physicalism. AncientGreek is the one who rejects it.
Whose idea of reductionism are you criticising? I think your post could get more useful by being more clear about the idea you want to challenge.
Hmm.
I think this is closest I get to having a "Definiton 3.4.1" in my post
...the other reductionism I mentioned, the 'big thing = small thing + small thing' one...
Essentially, the claim is that to accurately explain reality, non-reductionist explanations aren't always wrong.
The confusion, however, that I realized elsewhere in the thread, is that I conflate 'historical explanation' with 'predictive explanation'. Good predictive explanation will almost always be reductionist, because, as it says on the tin, big are made of smaller things. Good historical explanations, though, will... (read more)
That's what I mean by complexity, yeah.
I don't know if I made this was clear, but the point I make is independent of what high level principles explain thing, only that they are high level. The ancestors that competed across history to produce the organism of interest are not small parts making up a big thing, unless you subscribe to causal reductionism where you use causes instead of internal moving parts. But I don't like calling this reductionism (out even a theory, really) because it's, as I said, a species of causality, broadly construed.
[Why You Don't Think You're Beautiful](http://skepticexaminer.com/2016/05/dont-think-youre-beautiful/)
[Why You Don't Think You're Beautiful](http://intentionalinsights.org/why-you-dont-think-youre-beautiful)
Mary's room seems to be arguing that,
[experiencing(red)] =/= [experiencing(understanding([experiencing(red)] )] )]
(translation: the experience of seeing red is no the experience of understanding how seeing red works)
This is true, when we take those statements literally. But it's true in the same sense a Gödel encoding of statement in PA is not literally that statement. It is just a representation, but the representation is exactly homomorphic to its referent. Mary's representation of reality is presumed complete ex hypothesi, therefore she will understand exactly what will happen in her brain after seeing color, and that is exactly what happens.
You wouldn't call a statement of PA that isn't a literally a Gödel encoding of a statement... (read more)
There are two things you could mean when you say 'reductionism is right'. That reality is reductionist in the "big thing = small thing + small thing" sense, or that reductionist explanations are better by fiat.
Reality is probably reductionist. I won't assign perfect certainty, but reductionist reality is simpler than magical reality.
As it currently stands, we don't have a complete theory of reality, so the only criteria we can judge theories is that they 1) are accurate, 2) are simple.
I am not arguing about the rightness or wrongness of reductionism. Reductionism and contra-reductionism are containers, and they contain certain classes of explanations. Contra-reductionism conatins historical explanations, explaining the state of things by the interactions with outside forces, and reductionism contains predictive explanations, explaining the future behavior in terms of internal forces.
At least this tells me I didn't make a silly mistake in my post. Thank you for the feedback.
As for your objections,
All models are wrong, some models are useful.
exactly captures my conceit. Reductionism is correct in the sense that is, in some sense, closer to reality than anti- or contra-reductionism. Likely in a similar sense that machine code is closer to the reality of a physical computation than a .cpp file, though the analogy isn't exact, for reasons that should become clear.
I'm typing this on a laptop, which is a intricate amalgam of various kinds of atoms. Hypothetically, you could explain the positioning of the atoms in terms of dense quantum mechanical... (read more)
Epistemic Status: confused & unlikely
Author's note: the central claim of this article I now believe is confused, and mostly inaccurate. More precisely (in response to a comment by ChristianKl)
>Whose idea of reductionism are you criticising? I think your post could get more useful by being more clear about the idea you want to challenge.
... (read 1163 more words →)I think this is closest I get to having a "Definiton 3.4.1" in my post
"...the other reductionism I mentioned, the 'big thing = small thing + small thing' one..."
Essentially, the claim is that to accurately explain reality, non-reductionist explanations aren't always *wrong*.
The confusion, however, that I realized elsewhere in the thread, is that I conflate 'historical explanation' with 'predictive
Edit: I dug through OP's post history and found this thread. The thread gives better context to what /u/reguru is trying to say.
A tip: very little is gained by couching your ideas in this self-aggrandizing, condescending tone. Your over-reliance on second person is also an annoying tic, though some make it work. You don't, however.
You come off as very arrogant and immature, and very few people will bother wading through this. The few that will do it only in hopes of correcting you.
If you're at all interested in improving the quality of your writing, consider, at the very least, reading a few other top level, highly upvoted posts. They do not... (read 910 more words →)