By far the best definition I’ve ever heard of the supernatural is Richard Carrier’s: A “supernatural” explanation appeals to ontologically basic mental things, mental entities that cannot be reduced to nonmental entities.
Physicalism, materialism, empiricism, and reductionism are clearly similar ideas, but not identical. Carrier's criterion captures something about a supernatural ontology, but nothing about supernatural epistemology. Surely the central claim of natural epistemology is that you have to look...you can't rely on faith , or clear ideas implanted in our minds by God.
it seems that we have very good grounds for excluding supernatural explanations a priori
But making reductionism aprioristic arguably makes it less scientific...at least, what you gain in scientific ontology, you lose in scientific epistemology.
I mean, what would the universe look like if reductionism were false
We wouldn't have reductive explanations of some apparently high level phenomena ... Which we don't.
I previously defined the reductionist thesis as follows: human minds create multi-level models of reality in which high-level patterns and low-level patterns are separately and explicitly represented. A physicist knows Newton’s equation for gravity, Einstein’s equation for gravity, and the derivation of the former as a low-speed approximation of the latter. But these three separate mental representations, are only a convenience of human cognition. It is not that reality itself has an Einstein equation that governs at high speeds, a Newton equation that governs at low speeds, and a “bridging law” that smooths the interface. Reality itself has only a single level, Einsteinian gravity. It is only the Mind Projection Fallacy that makes some people talk as if the higher levels could have a separate existence—different levels of organization can have separate representations in human maps, but the territory itself is a single unified low-level mathematical object. Suppose this were wrong.
Suppose that the Mind Projection Fallacy was not a fallacy, but simply true.
Note that there are four possibilities here...
-
I assume a one level universe, all further details are correct.
-
I assume a one level universe, some details may be incorrect
-
I assume a multi level universe, all further details are correct.
-
I assume a multi level universe, some details may be incorrect.
How do we know that the MPF is actually fallacious, and what does it mean anyway?
If all forms of mind projection projection are wrong, then reductive physicalism is wrong, because quarks, or whatever is ultimately real, should not be mind projected, either.
If no higher level concept should be mind projected, then reducible higher level concepts shouldn't be ...which is not EY's intention.
Well, maybe irreducible high level concepts are the ones that shouldn't be mind projected.
That certainly amounts to disbelieving in non reductionism...but it doesn't have much to do with mind projection. If some examples of mind projection are acceptable , and the unacceptable ones coincide with the ones forbidden by reductivism, then MPF is being used as a Trojan horse for reductionism.
And if reductionism is an obvious truth , it could have stood on its own as apriori truth.
Suppose that a 747 had a fundamental physical existence apart from the quarks making up the 747. What experimental observations would you expect to make, if you found yourself in such a universe?
Science isn't 100% observation,it's a mixture of observation and explanation.
A reductionist ontology is a one level universe: the evidence for it is the success of reductive explanation , the ability to explain higher level phenomena entirely in terms of lower level behaviour. And the existence of explanations is aposteriori, without being observational data, in the usual sense. Explanations are abductive,not inductive or deductive.
As before, you should expect to be able to make reductive explanations of all high level phenomena in a one level universe....if you are sufficiently intelligent. It's like the Laplace's Demon illustration of determinism,only "vertical". If you find yourself unable to make reductive explanations of all phenomena, that might be because you lack the intelligence , or because you are in a non reductive multi level universe or because you haven't had enough time...
Either way, it's doubtful and aposteriori, not certain and apriori.
If you can’t come up with a good answer to that, it’s not observation that’s ruling out “non-reductionist” beliefs, but a priori logical incoherence"
I think I have answered that. I don't need observations to rule it out. Observations-rule it-in, and incoherence-rules-it-out aren't the only options.
People who live in reductionist universes cannot concretely envision non-reductionist universes.
Which is a funny thing to say, since science was non-reductionist till about 100 years ago.
One of the clinching arguments for reductionism.was the Schrödinger equation, which showed that in principle, the whole of chemistry is reducible to physics, while the rise of milecular biology showeds th rreducxibility of Before that, educators would point to the de facto hierarchy of the sciences -- physics, chemistry, biology, psychology, sociology -- as evidence of a multi-layer reality.
Unless the point is about "concretely". What does it mean to concretely envision a reductionist universe? Pehaps it means you imagine all the prima facie layers, and also reductive explanations linking them. But then the non-reductionist universe would require less envisioning, because byit's the same thing without the bridging explanations! Or maybe it means just envisioing huge arrays of quarks. Which you can't do. The reductionist world view , in combination with the limitations of the brain, implies that you pretty much have to use higher level, summarised concepts...and that they are not necessarily wrong.
But now we get to the dilemma: if the staid conventional normal boring understanding of physics and the brain is correct, there’s no way in principle that a human being can concretely envision, and derive testable experimental predictions about, an alternate universe in which things are irreducibly mental. Because, if the boring old normal model is correct, your brain is made of quarks, and so your brain will only be able to envision and concretely predict things that can predicted by quarks.
-
"Your brain is made of quarks" is aposteriori, not apriori.
-
Your brain being made of quarks doesn't imply anything about computability. In fact, the computatbolity of the ultimately correct version of quantum physics is an open question.
-
Incomputability isn't the only thing that implies irreducibility, as @ChronoDas points out.
-
Non reductionism is conceivable, or there would be no need to argue for reductionism.
What is the difference between this, and the quote above? Is merely the fact that “I will go to the beach this evening” is about the future,
No, it's also the fact that the future is taken to be unfixed. Future facts are knowable for a Laplace's Demon in a determined universe.
(Note that events that are undetermined because they depend on an agentive decision that hasn't been made yet are only a subset of undetermined events. You would also have difficulty fixing a belief about a random nuclear decay in the future)
And even free-will concerns evaporate if we adopt the perspective that decisions are not about changing the world, they are about learning what world you live i
Which is to say free will concerns "evaporate" if you assume determinism. This is not rationality. Rationality means believing the world is deterministic iff the world is deterministic ,believing it on the basis of a evidence...not assuming it to make problems go away.
Rationalists want as much as possible to be knowable, but believing things to be true because you want them to be is the essence of irrationality . Rationalists have to recognise that the nature of the world can constrain what is knowable.
(Indeterminism isn't the only problem area. There is also the indirectness of perception, which allows for simulation and other sceptical hypotheses -- you can't tell what is at the far end of a chain of a perceptual chain from the near end. And there is also the problem that a haphazardly evolved brain doesn't have any apriori guarantee to be able to.understand anything. And, quite possibly, an is-ought gap that prevents values being fixed by facts. ).
1If no comments without posts is the outcome you want, why not make it a rule?
1Most people distinguish between intentional acts and shit that happens.
Edit:
"I’ve thought about this in the context of wondering why people are so much more bothered by police brutality (which kills about a thousand people a year in the US) than traffic fatalities (which kill well over 30,000 people a year). I think there’s some sense in which they see police killings as our societal collective action, while traffic killings are just byproducts of a system we use, but none of that matters to the victims."
Intention matters because an undesirable outcome that isn't brought about intentionally is a tragedy, not a wrongdoing.
Which is not to say consequences don't matter, only that they do a different job. People get more het up over police brutality than traffic accidents because because it's seems as intentional , voluntary and avoidable,...and there is a set of social emotions that function to alter those kinds of behaviours.
People also don't approve of traffic fatalities, but think about the subject in a more technical , less emotive way,...because you can't solve the problem by blaming one person or group.
They are different kinds of "bad" , so there isn't a problem of failing to trade them off.
How do you know, in advance, that everything is reducible?
Our own desires can include the desire to avoid punishment, which is how society gets you to act against what would otherwise be your own desires.
Appeal to authority is generally considered to be fallacious[1],
It's the appeal to inappropriate authority which is fallacious. It's one of the things that are constantly misquoted.
because the veracity of a statement doesn’t change depending on who is saying it.
Genuine authorities believe things because those things gave a justification which us known to them: therefore , the fact that they believe X is evidence that there is justification for X, a kind of indirect evidence of justification.
Which might be what you are saying.
You have set out some criteria for being a probability statement at all. There are further criteria for being a true probability statement. It's obviously possible to check probability claims.
"it" isn't a single theory.
The argument that Everettian MW is favoured by Solomonoff induction, is flawed.
If the program running the SWE outputs information about all worlds on a single output tape, they are going to have to be concatenated or interleaved somehow. Which means that to make use of the information, you gave to identify the subset of bits relating to your world. That's extra complexity which isn't accounted for because it's being done by hand, as it were..