RafeFurst
13
5
RafeFurst has not written any posts yet.
Reductionism is great. The main problem is that by itself it tells us nothing new. Science depends on hypothesis generation, and reductionism says nothing about how to do that in a rational way, only how to test hypotheses rationally. For some reason the creative side of science -- and I use the word "creative" in the generative sense -- is never addressed by methodology in the same way falsifiability is:
http://emergentfool.com/2010/02/26/why-falsifiability-is-insufficient-for-scientific-reasoning/
We are at a stage of historical enlightenment where more and better reductionism is producing marginal returns. To be even less wrong, we might spend more time on the hypothesis generation side of the equation.
Agreed. Why would we believe a quark is not "emergent"? Could be turtles all the way down....
I agree with your skepticism a QM model of classical realm mechanics being ipso facto more accurate. Since by unsurmountable algorithmic complexity problems we agree this is an untestable hypothesis, confidence should start out low. And there's lots of circumstantial evidence that the farther you go down the levels of organization in order to explain the higher level, the less accuracy this yields. It's easier to explain human behavior with pre-supposed cognitive constructs (like pattern recognition, cognitive biases, etc) than with neurological.
The map is not the terrain, but maybe the map for level 1 is the terrain for level 2.
"Mere" is the problem.
Emergence is NOT the sum of the parts.
I'm curious, Eliezer, what you think of Alex Ryan's and Cosma Shalizi's definitions/formalisms of emergence?
http://www.per.marine.csiro.au/staff/Fabio.Boschetti/papers/ITprimer.pdf http://arxiv.org/pdf/nlin/0609011 http://www.cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/thesis/single-spaced-thesis.pdf
The both seem to be claiming that emergence is more than you are, but that could be an illusion...
For me the key to leveling up is to question every assumption (often) and find sources of novelty regularly. I liken cognition to a hill-climbing search on the landscape of theories/models/maps that explain/predict reality. It’s easy to get stuck on peaks of local maximality. Injecting randomness creates a sort of Boltzmann machine of the mind and increases my chances of finding higher peaks.
But I have to be prepared to be more confused — and question more assumptions than I intended to — because chances are my new random placement on the landscape is initially lower than the local maximum I was on prior. This part is scary.... (read more)