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 ...
Agreed. Why would we believe a quark is not "emergent"? Could be turtles all the way down....
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 i... (read more)