Reductionism

This denial that "higher level" entities actually exist causes a problem when we are supposed to identify ourselves with such an entity. Does the mind of a cognitive scientist only exist in the mind of a cognitive scientist?

One minor quibble; how do we know there is any most basic level?

Yet something in the real world makes it tractable to create the "map" -- to find those hidden class variables which enable Naive Bayes.

This is an example of Eliezer's extreme overconfidence. As he rightly points out, we cannot in fact construct a quantum mechanical model of a 747. Yet he asserts as absolute fact that such a model would be more accurate than our usual models.

I think it would be too. But I don't assert this as absolute fact, much less the universal claim that reality in no way has different levels in it; especially since, as Mitchell points out, one level of reality seems to be our mental representations, which cannot be said to be mere representations of representations. They are precisely real representations.

Our brain and senses are made out of fundamental particles too, and the image of a plane with wings is the result of the interaction between the fundamental particles out there with the fundamental particles in us.

So I would I say the plane image is an effect not a primary, but that does not make it any less real than the primary. It is a real thing, just as real, that just happens to be further down the chain of cause and effect.

Reductionism does have a caveat, and this is "a fact about maps" and not "a fact about the territory": the real world level can be below the algorithm. Example: a CD. A chromodynamic model would spend immense computing resources simulating the heat and location and momentum and bonds of a slew of atoms (including those in the surrounding atmosphere, or the plasticizer would boil off). In reality there are about four things that matter in a CD: you can pick it up, it fits into a standard box, it fits into a standard reader tray, and when you measure the pattern of pits they encode a particular blob of binary data. From a human utility perspective, the CD is fully replaceable with a chromodynamically dissimilar other CD that happens to have those same characteristics.

Computers are full of examples of this, where the least important level is not the fundamental level. In in some cases, each level is not just built upon lower levels, but ought to be fully independent of them. If your lisp doesn't implement the lambda calculus because of a silicon fault, an atomic model would correctly represent this, but it would be representing a mathematically unimportant bug. A correct lisp would be representable on any compute substrate, from a Mac to a cranks-and-gears Babbage engine. A model which took account of the substrate would be missing the point.

This is a situation where a lot of confidence seems appropriate, though of course not infinite confidence. I'd put the chance that Eliezer is wrong here at below one percent.

When an image you are looking at is altered due to viewing it through a pane of coloured glass, you don't suddenly start calling it "the map" instead of "the territory."

So why is it, when it passes through our eyes and brain it suddenly becomes "the map," when the brain is made of the same fundamental stuff (quarks etc.) as the glass?

Our brain and senses are made out of fundamental particles too, and the image of a plane with wings is the result of the interaction between the fundamental particles out there with the fundamental particles in us.

Ian C - are you claiming that there are no maps, just lots of territory, some of which refers to other bits of territory? While probably accurate, this doesn't seem very useful if we're trying to understand minds. I don't think Eliezer ever claims that maps are stored in the glove compartments of cars in the car park, just outside The Territory. I'd enjoy a few posts going deeper into the map/territory analogy though.

Computers are full of examples of this, where the [most] important level is not the fundamental level.

Bzzzzzt! Please taboo the word 'important' and tell us what you mean.

Atomic interactions work just as well in a lump of scrap as in a 747. But a 747 won't work without atomic interactions. This being the case, higher levels can't be more 'important' than more fundamental ones, unless 'important' means 'more intuitively obvious to the human eye'.

As long as no-one makes the ridiculous claim that, say, biology is worthless because atomic theory could, ideally, explain giraffes, then is there really any disagreeing with this post?

Ben Jones - yes, I'm saying there's just lots of territory. I think it's useful to understanding minds, because (if correct) it means they don't work by making an internal mirror of reality to study, but rather they just "latch on" to actual reality at a certain point. The role of the brain in that case would not be to "hold" the internal mirror copy, but to manipulate reality to make it amenable to latching.

I always found Hofstadter's take on the issue illuminating.

Disappointingly, dictionaries and encyclopaedias today seem to have defined reductionism and holism away from Hofstadter's usage - to the detriment of both of the terms involved.

Ian - if minds don't create their own distinct internal maps, but simply 'latch on' to what's actually there, then how do explain the fact that maps can be wrong? In fact, how do you explain any two people holding two opposed beliefs?

Sensory perception isn't like a photograph - low-resolution but essentially representative. It's like an idiot describing a photograph to someone who's been blind all their life. This is why we get our maps wrong, and that is why it's useful to think in terms of map and territory - so that we can try and draw better ones.

Ben Jones: "if minds don't create their own distinct internal maps, but simply 'latch on' to what's actually there, then how do explain the fact that maps can be wrong? In fact, how do you explain any two people holding two opposed beliefs?"

Different people have different eyes, nervous systems and brains, so the causal path from the primary object to the part of reality in their brain to which they are latching on can be different.

I agree sensory perception is not like a photograph, but I don't think it's like an idiot trying to explain to us. I don't believe there's the outside world, and then an idiot distortion layer, and then our unfortunate internal model. There's one reality, and one part of it outside our body acts by a chain of cause and effect on another part inside our body, of which we happen to be able to be conscious.

So if the internal object is just as real as the external object, then we're done. We have our contact point with reality, and can begin to study it and figure out the universe, including deducing (maybe one day) the existence of the primary object. But whether it actually resembles the primary object in some way, surely that is not the main issue? From an evolutionary point of view, it doesn't have to be similar, just useful, and from an epistemological point of view it's not important whether it is (at all) similar or not.

At present, we cannot generate accurate quantum mechanical descriptions of atoms more complex than hydrogen (and, if we fudge a bit, helium). Any attempt to do so, because of the complexity and intractability of the equations evolved, produces results that are less accurate than our empirically-derived understanding.

Even if we ignore the massive computational problems with trying to create a QM model of an airplane, such a model is guaranteed to be less accurate than the existing higher-order models of aerodynamics and material science.

We presume that our models, if we knew how to generate and evaluate them, would accurately describe things on an atomic level, and this is not unreasonable to claim. But Eliezer's claim goes far, far, far beyond what can be justified at present.

I'm surprised that this point is controversial enough that Eliezer felt the need to make a post about it, and even more surprised that he's catching heat in the comments for it. This "reductionism" is something I believe down to the bone, to the extent that I have trouble conceptualizing the world where it is false.

The essential idea behind reductionism, that if you have reliable rules for how the pieces behave then in principle you can apply them to determine how the whole behaves, has to be true. To say otherwise is to argue that the airplane can be flying while all its constituent pieces are still on the ground.

But if you can't do a calculation in practice, does it matter whether or not it would give you the right answer if you could?

And there goes Caledonian again, completely misrepresenting Eliezer's claims.

His arguments are completely baseless. Of course it would be very, very, very hard to make a QM model of an airplane, and attempting it now would fail miserably - Eliezer wouldn't dispute that.

But to say that a full-fledged QM model would be guaranteed to be less accurate than current models is downright preposterous.

Caledonian's job is to contradict Eliezer.

I'm surprised that this point is controversial enough that Eliezer felt the need to make a post about it, and even more surprised that he's catching heat in the comments for it. This "reductionism" is something I believe down to the bone, to the extent that I have trouble conceptualizing the world where it is false.

Seconded.

I suppose the next post is on how a non-reductionist universe would overwhelmingly violate Occam's Razor?

Caledonian's job is to contradict Eliezer.

Not even that -- it's as if he and other commenters (e.g. Unknown in this case) are simply demanding that Eliezer express his points with less conviction.

If you think Eliezer is wrong, say so and explain why. Merely protesting that he is "confident beyond what is justified", or whatever, amounts to pure noisemaking that is of no use to anyone.

Slighlty off-topic. I am a bit new to all this. I am a bit thick too. So help me out here. Please.

Am I right in understanding that the map/territory analogy implies that the map is always evaluated outside the territory?

I guess, I'm asking the age old Star Trek transporter question. When I am beamed up, which part of which quark forms the boundary between me and Scotty.

I wish I knew where Reality got its computing power. Hehe, good question that one. Incidentally, I'd like to link this rather old thing just in case anyone cares to read more about reality-as-computation.

Ian C - well put. My point is that since there is, at least, some distortion between mind and world (hence this very blog), it's useful to think in terms of map and territory. At the simplest level, it stops us confusing the two. If you have a wrong belief, saying 'my mind is part of reality!' doesn't make it any less wrong. Agreed?

I don't believe there's the outside world, and then an idiot distortion layer, and then our unfortunate internal model.

That was exactly the situation I found myself in at about 3am on Sunday morning.

Ben Jones: "If you have a wrong belief, saying 'my mind is part of reality!' doesn't make it any less wrong. Agreed?"

I agree that there is a difference between the object in the mind and the object in the world, but I wouldn't call it distortion any more than a chair is a distortion of the table next to it. They are both just different parts of reality. But if your mind can only be aware of the chair then you must discover the table by deduction, which is what someone trying to "correct" the chair would do also. So yes, I guess it makes little practical difference.

"That was exactly the situation I found myself in at about 3am on Sunday morning."

And here I was thinking it was only a model, when it was direct observation all along! Who am I to contradict direct observation? I hereby accept your theory and discard my own :-)

I agree that there is a difference between the object in the mind and the object in the world, but I wouldn't call it distortion any more than a chair is a distortion of the table next to it.

But the chair isn't seeking to imitate the table. That's one thing that minds do that nothing else does - form abstract representations. It's not magic, but it's a pretty impressive trick for a couple of pounds of quivering territory.

Besides, you've already acknowledged that the mental concept has a causal link with the object itself. Chairs aren't causally linked to tables. Like you say, they're both just different parts of reality. Minds and maps are more subtle.

We may believe that 'what we see is what's actually there', but in truth there are millennia of evolutionary filters and lenses distorting our perception of the territory. And you can't start eliminating the errors from your map until you realise that a) you have a map, b) your map is not the territory, and c) your map doesn't even look much like the territory.

That last paragraph's for the back of the book, Eliezer.

Ben Jones: "But the chair isn't seeking to imitate the table."

But the mind isn't seeking to imitate reality either. The mind seeks to provide awareness of reality, that is all. In taking the data of the senses and processing it only following the laws of cause and effect, it achieves this goal (because the output of the pipeline remains reality).

The idea that it is trying to imitate (and the associated criticisms like map, territory and distortion) come from looking at the evolved design after the fact and assuming how it is supposed to work without taking a wide enough view of all the ways awareness of reality could be implemented.

'I wish I knew where Reality got its computing power.'

Assume Reality has gotten computing power and that it makes computations. Computation requires time. Occurrence would require the time required for the occurrence plus the time necessary for Reality to make the computation for that occurrence. The more complex the occurrence, either more computing power or longer computation time, or both. Accounting for that seems a challenge that can not be overcome.

Alternatively, let's assume Reality did not get computing power and that it does not make computations. Rather, let's assume that there are computational activities within Reality.

Perhaps Reality is certainty, while attempts to comprehend Reality are computational activities that have acquired mapping processes that attempt to map certainty.

Changing the sentence to: 'I wish I knew why I believe there is a where from which Reality got its computing power.' gets me to an answer while the original question precluded me from one.

Interesting to see all this fervent and unquestioning faith in reductionism here. No surprise.

However, reductionism is incapable of explaining the real world.

Consider protein folding. A good rough approximation model of a protein is a string with a hundred magnets tied to it.

Now throw the string up into the air.

The notion that the string would immediately fold into a precise shape every time you throw it, is the same as the notion that a protein would fold into a precise shape, very quickly, every time you make it. And yet that is what proteins do. And we have no reductionistic explanation that fits the facts.

There are billions of very close to minimum-energy configurations for each protein sequence based on the electrochemical forces between the amino acids in the chain and hydrophilic / hydrophobic considerations. And yet only one of them is chosen, often in a few microseconds. This is totally inexplicable based on a reductionistic analysis. We CANNOT predict protein conformation based on the physical and chemical properties of the amino acid chains.

All of the protein folding software uses the folding behavior of known proteins and sub-domains of known proteins (such as α-helices and β-sheets) to attempt to guess protein structures, and even then there are many solutions to the equations (in a "successful" analysis the actual tertiary structure will match one of the possible structures that the software came up with, but not any of the others, and reductionism is at a complete loss why). Rupert Sheldrake suggests an answer based on an evolving set of holonic structures where each more complex level includes the behaviors of its constituent holons, yet also includes additional properties basically "chosen" by the universe through a repetition and reinforcement of habits.

Even with supposedly "well known" phenomena like snowflake crystallization the reductionist explanation simply fails to ring true. Why in a probabalistic structure like a very well-formed snowflake is there so much symmetry between arms (and most especially the mirror symmetry on each arm) between areas that are millions or billions of atoms away from each other? The "contact mechanics" explanation simply doesn't wash. Snowflake branches are very obviously probabalistic structures, so the "changing growing conditions of the snowflake" explanation simply doesn't wash, since probabalistic structures ought not show such high amounts of symmetry unless some kind of resonance is occurring between the arms and reflections of arms in the snowflake.

Unquestioning reductionism blinds people to some very simple observations about the world. . .

But to say that a full-fledged QM model would be guaranteed to be less accurate than current models is downright preposterous.

No, it follows directly from our inability to simulate 'complex' atoms. If we can't represent the basic building blocks of matter correctly, how are we supposed to represent the matter?

A correct model of physics would, given enough computational power, allow us to perfectly simulate everything in reality, on every level of reality. QM is known not to be correct; it is in fact known to be incorrect in the ultimate sense. It is merely the most correct model we possess.

"However, reductionism is incapable of explaining the real world."

Is that the argument against Reductionism? That there are things it can't, as yet, explain? That's the same position the Intelligent Design people put forward. Your post is a big fat Semantic Stop Sign.

No, we don't understand protein folding yet. Precedent suggests that one day, we probably will, and it probably won't be down to some mystical emergent phenomenon. It'll be complicated, subtle, amazing, and fully explicable within the realms of reductionist science.

A quick Google search turns up:

But the crystal growth depends strongly on temperature (as is seen in the morphology diagram). Thus the six arms of the snow crystal each change their growth with time. And because all six arms see the same conditions at the same times, they all grow about the same way.... If you think this is hard to swallow, let me assure you that the vast majority of snow crystals are not very symmetrical.

It's not that reductionism is wrong, but rather that it's only part of the story. Additional understanding can be gleaned through a bottom-up, emergent explanation which is orthogonal to the top-down reductionist explanation of the same system.

It is important to take seriously the reality of higher level models (maps). Or alternatively to admit that they are just as unreal, but also just as important to understanding, as the lower level models. As Aaron Boyden points out, it is not a foregone conclusion that there is a most basic level.

Reductionism IS the bottom-up, emergent explanation. It tries to reduce reality to basic elements that together produce the phenomena of interest - you can't get any more emergent than that.

From the Wikipedia definition for "reductionism":

"Reductionism can either mean (a) an approach to understanding the nature of complex things by reducing them to the interactions of their parts, or to simpler or more fundamental things or (b) a philosophical position that a complex system is nothing but the sum of its parts, and that an account of it can be reduced to accounts of individual constituents."

and

"The limit of reductionism's usefulness stems from emergent properties of complex systems which are more common at certain levels of organization."

Rafe, do you mean that as a criticism? Because usefulness and reality are very different things. There are two things that can make a reductionist model less useful:

1. It requires much more computational power. This has been discussed already.
2. Because even modest mistakes at lower levels can have drastic effects at higher levels.

Both, you'll notice, are practical problems pertaining to the model, and don't invalidate the principle.

So human brains are themselves models of reality.

Do you have a deterministic view of the world, i.e. believe reality is there, independently of our existence or of our interactions with it?

Have you ever wondered what is information, at the physical level.. what is it that our brains are actually modelling?

Simply because particles are the smallest things does not mean they are the only things. Particles are defined by how they act. How a particle will act can only be determined by taking into account the particles surrounding it. And to fully examine those particles, their surrounding particles must be examined. And so on and so forth...

As you move up in scale, new rules and attributes emerge that do not exist at the smaller scales. You can speculate about whether or not these new things might have been deduced as possibilities from quantum laws. But short of complete omniscience (physically impossible by the uncertainty principle), the subatomic laws will only tell you what can arise, not what does emerge.

So it doesn't really make sense to arbitrarily draw a line at a certain scale of examination and say, "Only these things REALLY exist." Reductionism yields a convenient mental model with practical application... but it is still just a map.

Wockyman: It's not that they're the smallest, as such.

Yes, how a particle acts is affected by those around it. But the idea is that if you know the basic rules, then knowing those rules, plus which particles are where around it lets you predict, in principle, given sufficient computational power, stuff about how it will act. In other words, the complicated stuff that emerges arises from the more basic stuff.

Think of it this way: You know cellular automatons? Especially Conaway's Game of Life? Really simple rules, just the grid, cells that can be on and off, and basic rules for when a transition occurs based on a cell's and its neighbor's state.

Yet complicated behavior arises out of that. One would not, however, say that behavior is beyond the rules, or that reduction to those rules fails. Those complicated behaviors arise out of those simple rules.

Incidentally, if you looked through Eliezer's QM sequence, the more fundamental reduction isn't so much particles, but probably quantum amplitudes over configuration space, with particles corresponding with it being possible to "factor out" certain sets of dimensions in the configuration space.

(Reductionism does NOT mean "reduction to particles", just "reduction to simple principles that are the basic thing that give rise to everything else", not identical to, but similar to the way that comparatively simple rules of chess give rise to really complex strategies (and even more so for Go))

As for it being "just a map"... it is a map, but it's a map about something. The map may not be the territory, but there is a territory, and the fact that the map seems to tell us accurate stuff about the territory is at least a justification for suspecting that the actual underlying reality of the territory may actually resemble what the map claims it's like.

But the way physics really works, as far as we can tell, is that there is only the most basic level - the elementary particle fields and fundamental forces.

To clarify (actually, to push this further): there is only one thing (the universe) - because surely breaking the thing down into parts (such as objects) which in turn lets you notice relations between parts (which in turn lets you see time, for example) -- surely all that is stuff done by modelers of reality and not by reality itself? I'm trying to say that the universe isn't pre-parsed (if that makes any sense...)

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.

Probably no one will ever see this comment, but.

"I wish I knew where reality got its computing power."

If reality had less computing power, what differences would you expect to see? You're part of the computation, after all; if everything stood still for a few million meta-years while reality laboriously computed the next step, there's no reason this should affect what you actually end up experiencing, any more than it should affect whether planets stay in their orbits or not. For all we know, our own computers are much faster (from our perspective) than the machines on which the Dark Lords of the Matrix are simulating us (from their perspective).

Sounds like one of the central tenants of discordianism. There is no such thing as wings, identity, truth, the concept of equality. These are all abstract concepts that exist only in the mind. "Out there" in "True" reality, there is only chaos (not necessarily of the random kind, just of the meaningless/purposeless kind).

But this is just the brain trying to be efficiently compress an object that it cannot remotely begin to model on a fundamental level. The airplane is too large. Even a hydrogen atom would be too large. Quark-to-quark interactions are insanely intractable. You can't handle the truth.

Can you handle the truth then? I don't understand the notion of truth you are using. In everyday language, when a person states something as "true", it doesn't usually need to be grounded to logic in order to work for a practical purpose. But you are making extremely abstract statements here. They just don't mean anything unless you define truth and solve the symbol grounding problem. You have criticized philosophy in other threads, yet here you are making dubious arguments. The arguments are dubious because they are not clearly mere rhetoric, and not clearly philosophy. If someone tries to require you to explain the meaning of them, you could say you're not interested of philosophy, so philosophical counterarguments are irrelevant to you. But you can't be disinterested of philosophy if you make philosophical claims like that and actually consider them important.

I don't like contemporary philosophy either, but I would suppose you are in trouble with these things, and I wonder if you are open to a solution? If not, fine.

But the way physics really works, as far as we can tell, is that there is only the most basic level - the elementary particle fields and fundamental forces. You can't handle the raw truth, but reality can handle it without the slightest simplification. (I wish I knew where Reality got its computing power.)

But you haven't defined reality. As long as you haven't done so, "reality" will be a metaphorical, vague concept, which frequently changes its meaning in use. This means if you state something to be "reality" in one discussion, logical analysis would probably reveal you didn't use it in the same meaning in another discussion.

You can have a deterministic definition of reality, but that will be arbitrary. Then people will start having completely pointless debates with you, and to make matters worse, you will perceive these debates as people trying to unjustify what you are doing. That's a problem caused by you not realizing you didn't have to justify your activities or approach in the first place. You didn't need to make these philosophical claims, and I don't suppose you would done so had you not felt threatened by something, such as religion or mysticism or people imposing their views on you.

This, as I see it, is the thesis of reductionism. Reductionism is not a positive belief, but rather, a disbelief that the higher levels of simplified multilevel models are out there in the territory.

If you categorize yourself as a reductionist, why don't you go all the way? You can't be both a reductionist and a realist. Ie. you can't believe in reductionism and in the existence of a territory at the same time. You have to drop either one of them. But which one?

Drop the one you need to drop. I'm serious. You don't need this metaphysical nonsense to justify something you are doing. Neither reductionism nor realism is "true" in any meaningful way. You are not doing anything wrong if you are a reductionist for 15 minutes, then switch to realism (ie. the belief in a "territory") for ten seconds, then switch again into reductionism and then maybe to something else. And that is also the way you really live your life. I mean, think about your mind. I suppose it's somewhat similar to mine. You don't think about that metaphysical nonsense when you're actually doing something practical. So you are not a metaphycisist when you're riding a bike and enjoying the wind or something.

It's just some conception of yourself which you have, that you have defined as someone who is an advocate of "reductionism and realism". This conception is true only when you indeed are either one of those. It's not true, when you're neither of those. But you are operating in your mind. Suppose someone says to you you're not a "reductionist and a realist" when you are, for example, in intense pain for some reason and are very unlikely to think about philosophy. Well, even in that case you could remind yourself of your own conception of yourself, that is, you are a "reductionist and a realist", and argue that the person who said you are not was wrong. But why would you want to do so? The only reasons I see are some naive or egoistic or defensive reasons, such as:

• You are afraid the person who said you're not a "reductionist or realist" will try to waste your time by presenting stupid arguments according to which you may or may not or should or should not do something.
• You believe your image of yourself as a "reductionist and realist" is somehow "true". But you are able to decide at will whether that image is true. It is true when you are thinking in a certain way, and false when you are not thinking that way. So the statement conveys no useful information, except maybe on something you would like to be or something like that. But that is no longer philosophy.
• You have some sort of a need to never get caught uttering something that's not true. But in philosophy, it's a really bad idea to want to make true statements all the time. Metaphysical theories in and of itself are neither true nor false. Instead, they are used to define truth and falsehood. They can be contradictory or silly or arbitrary, but they can't be true or false.

If you state you to regard one state of mind or one theory, such as realism or reductionism, as some sort of an ultimate truth, you are simply putting yourself into a prison of words for no reason except that you apparently perceive some sort of safety in that prison or something like that. But its not safe. It exposes you to philosophical criticism you previously were invulnerable towards, because before you went to that prison, you didn't even participate in that game.

If you actually care about philosophy, great. But I haven't yet gotten such an impression. It seems like philosophy is an unpleasant chore to you. You want to use philosophy to obtain justification, a sense of entitlement, or something, and then throw it away because you think you're already finished with it - that you've obtained a framework theory which already suits your needs, and you can now focus on the needs. But you're not a true reductionist in the sense you defined reductionism, unless you also scrap the belief in the territory. I don't care what you choose as long as you're fine with it, but I don't want you to contradict yourself.

There is no way to express the existence of the "territory" as a meaningfully true statement. Or if there is, I haven't heard of it. It is a completely arbitrary declaration you use to create a framework for the rest of the things you do. You can't construct a "metatheory of reality" which is about the territory, which you suppose to exist, and have that same territory prove the metatheory is right. The territory may contain empirical evidence that the metatheory is okay, but no algorithm can use that evidence to produce proof for the metatheory, because:

• From "territory's" point of view, the metatheory is undefined.
• But the notion of gathering empirical evidence is meaningless if the metatheory, according to which the "territory" exists, is undefined.

Therefore, you have to define it if you want to use it for something, and just accept the fact that you can't prove it to be somehow true, much less use its alleged truth to prove something else false. You can believe what you want, but you can't make an AI that would use "territory" to construct a metatheory of territory, if it's somehow true to the AI that territory is all there is. The AI can't even construct a metatheory of "map and territory", if it's programmed to hold as somehow true that map and territory are the only things that exist. This entails that the AI cannot conceptualize its own metaphysical beliefs even as well as you can. It could not talk about them at all. To do so, it would have to be able to construct arbitrary metatheories on its own. This can only be done if the AI holds no metaphysical belief as infallible, that is, the AI is a reductionist in your meaning of the word.

I've seen some interest towards AI on LW. If you really would like to one day construct a very human-like AI, you will have problems if you cannot program an AI that can conceptualize the structure of its own cognitive processes also in terms that do not include realism. Because humans are not realists all the time. Their mind has a lot of features, and the metaphysical assumption of realism is usually only constructed when it is needed to perform some task. So if you want to have that assumption around all the time, you'll just end up adding unnecessary extra baggage to the AI which will probably also make the code very difficult to comprehend. You don't want to lug the assumption around all the time just because it's supposed to be true in some way nobody can define.

You could as well have a reductionist theory, which only constructs realism (ie. the declaration that an external world exists) under certain conditions. Now, philosophy doesn't usually include such theories, because the discipline is rather outdated, but there's no inherent reason why it can't be done. Realism is neither true not false in any meaningful and universal way. You are free to state it to exist if you are going to use that statement for something. But if you just say it, as if it would mean something in and of itself, you are not saying anything meaningful.

I hope you were interested of my rant.

See SEQ RERUN 29th Feb 2012 for more discussion

One way of tracing the uhm, data I guess might be to say, we see, naively, a chair. And know that underneath the chair out there is, at the bottom level we're aware of, energy fields and fundamental forces. And those concepts, like the chair, correspond to a physics model, which is in turn a simplification/distillation of vast reams of recorded experimental data into said rules/objects, which is in turn actual results of taking measurements during experiments, which in turn are the results of actual physical/historical events. So the reductionist model - fields and forces - I think is still a map of experimental results tagged with like, interpretations that tie them together, I guess.

Whatever the bottom level of our understanding of the map, even a one-level map is still above the territory, so there're still levels below that which carry back to, presumedly, territory. We find some fields-and-forces model that accounts for all the data we're aware of. But, its always going to be possible - less likely the more data we get - that something flies along and causes us to modify it. So, if we wanted to continue the reductionistic approach about the model we're making about our world, stripping away higher level abstractions, we'd say that its an in-process unifying simplification of and minimal inferences from the results of many experiments, which correspond to measurements of the world at certain levels of sensitivity by different means.

This post, represents for me, the typical LW response to something like the Object Oriented Ontologies of Paul Levi Bryant and DeLanda. These Ontologies attempt to give things like numbers, computations, atoms, fundamental particles, galaxies, higher level laws, fundamental laws, concepts, referents of concepts, etc. equal ontological status. They, hence, are strictly against making a distinction between map and territory, there is only territory, and all things that are, are objects.

I'm a confident reductionist, model/reality (bayesian), type guy. I'm not having major second thoughts about that, right now. But engaging in productive debate with object oriented philosophers might be a good chance for us to check ourselves,i.e., see how confident we really should be in our reductionist ontology. There are leading philosophers, and other scientists, that are apposed to reductionism, and opposed to correlationism. They have blogs, and are often open to debate. There's no point missing out on talking with someone that see's the universe fundamentally different from you in a way that is technically derivable.

Does the reductionist model give different predictions about the world than the non-reductionist model? If so, are any easily checked?

Solomonoff Induction, in so much as it is related to interpretations at all, rejects 'many worlds interpretation' because valid (non falsified) code strings are the ones whose output began with the actual experimental outcome rather than list all possible outcomes, i.e. are very much Copenhagen - like.

Has this point ever been answered? If we are content with the desired output appearing somewhere along the line - as opposed to the start - then the simplest theory of everything would be printing enough digits of pi, and our universe would be described somewhere down the line.

(See slides 11, 12 here.)

This website is doing amazing things to the way I think every day, as well as occasionally making me die of laughter.

Thank you, Eliezer!

"having different descriptions at different levels" is itself something you say that belongs in the realm of Talking About Maps, not the realm of Talking About Territory

Why do we distinguish “map” and “territory”? Because they correspond to “beliefs” and “reality”, and we have learnt elsewhere in the Sequences that

my beliefs determine my experimental predictions, but only reality gets to determine my experimental results.

Let’s apply that test. It isn’t only predictions that apply at different levels, so do the results. We can have right or wrong models at quark level, atom level, crystal level, and engineering component level. At each level, the fact that one model is right and another wrong is a fact about reality: it is Talking about Territory. When we say a 747 wing is really there, we mean that (for example) visualising it as a saucepan will result in expectations that the results will not fulfil in the way that they will when visualising it as a wing. Indeed, we can have many different models of the wing, all equally correct - since they all result in predictions that conform to the same observations. The choice of correct model is what is in our head. The fact that it has to be (equivalent to) a model of a wing to be correct is in the Territory. In short, when Talking about Territory we can describe things at as many levels (of aggregation) as yield descriptions that can be tested against observation.

at different levels

What exactly is meant by “levels” here? The Naval Gunner is arguing about levels of approximation. The discussion of Boeing 747 wings is an argument about levels of aggregation. They are not the same thing. Treating the forces on an aircraft wing at the aggregate level is leaving out internal details that per se do not affect the result. There will certainly be approximations involved in practice, of course, but they don’t stem from the actual process of aggregation, which is essentially a matter of combining all the relevant force equations algebraically, eliminating internal forces, before solving them; rather than combining the calculated forces numerically.

...the way physics really works, as far as we can tell, is that there is only the most basic level—the elementary particle fields and fundamental forces

The way that reality works, as far as we can tell, is that there are basic ingredients, with their properties, which in any given system at any given instant exist in a particular configuration. Now reality is not just the ingredients but also the configuration - a wrong model of the configuration will give wrong predictions just as a wrong model of the ingredients will. The possible configurations include known stable structures. These structures are likewise real because any model of a configuration which cannot be transformed into a model which includes the identified structure in question is in conflict with reality. Physics is I understand it comprises (a) laws that are common to different configurations of the ingredients, and (b) laws that are common to different configurations of the known stable structures. Physicalism implies the belief that laws (b) are always consistent with laws (a) when both are sufficiently accurate.

...The laws of physics do not contain distinct additional causal entities that correspond to lift or airplane wings

True but the key word here is “additional”. Newton’s laws were undoubtedly laws of physics, and in my school physics lessons were expressed in terms of forces on bodies, rather than on their constituent particles. The laws for forces on constituent particles were then derived from Newton’s laws by a thought experiment in which a body is divided up. In higher education today the reverse process is the norm, but reality is indifferent to which equivalent formulation we use: both give identical predictions.[Original wording edited]

General Relativity contains the additional causal entity known as space-time curvature, which is an aggregate effect of all the massive particles in the universe given their configuration so is not a natural fit in the Procrustean bed of reductionism. [Postscript] Interestingly, I've read that Newton was never happy with his idea of gravitation as a force of attraction between two things because it implied a property shared between the two things concerned and therefore being intrinsic to neither - but failed to find a better formulation.

The critical words are really and see

Indeed, but when you see a wing it is not just in the mind, it is also evidence of how reality is configured. It is the result of the experiment you perform by looking.

.. the laws of physics themselves, use different descriptions at different levels—as yonder artillery gunner thought

What the gunner really thought is pure speculation of course, but this assumption by EY raises an important point about meta-models.

In thought experiments the outcome is determined by the applicable universal laws – that’s meta-model (A). In any real-world case you need a model of the application as well as models of universal laws. That’s meta-model (B). An actual artillery shell will be affected by things like air resistance, so the greater accuracy of Einstein’s laws in textbook cases is no guarantee of it giving more accurate results in this case. EY obviously knew this, but his meta-model excluded it from consideration here. Treating the actual application as a case governed only by Newton’s or Einstein’s laws is itself a case of “Mind Projection Fallacy” – projecting meta-model (A) onto a real-world application. So it’s not a case of the gunner mistaking a model for reality, but of mistaking the criteria for choosing between one imperfect model and another. I imagine gunners are generally practical men, and in the field of the applied sciences it is very common for competing theories to have their own fields of application where they are more accurate than the alternatives – so although he was clearly misinformed, at least his meta-model was the right one.

[Postscript] An arguable version of reductionism is the belief that laws about the ingredients of reality are in some sense "more fundamental" than laws about stable structures of the ingredients. This cannot be an empirical truth, since both laws give the same predictions where they overlap so cannot be empirically distinguished. Neither is any logical contradiction implied by its negation. It can only be a metaphysical truth, whatever that is. Doesn't it come down to believing Einstein's essentialist concept of science against Bohr's instrumentalist version? That science doesn't just describe, but also tells? So pick Bohr as an opponent if you must, not some anonymous gunner.

"No," he said, "I mean that relativity will give you the wrong answer, because things moving at the speed of artillery shells are governed by Newtonian mechanics, not relativity."

[extreme steelman mode on]

By “relativity” he must have meant the ultrarelativistic approximation, of course.

[extreme steelman mode off]

:-)

Should one really be so certain about there being no higher-level entities? You said that simulating higher-level entities takes fewer computational resources, so perhaps our universe is a simulation and that the creators, in an effort to save computational resources, made the universe do computations on higher-level entities when no-one was looking at the "base" entities. Far-fetched, maybe, but not completely implausible.

Perhaps if we start observing too many lower-level entities, the world will run out of memory. What would that look like?

But this is just the brain trying to be efficiently compress an object that it cannot remotely begin to model on a fundamental level. The airplane is too large. Even a hydrogen atom would be too large. Quark-to-quark interactions are insanely intractable. You can't handle the truth.

Less Wrongs "The Futility of Emergence" article argues against using the word "emergence", claiming that it provides no additional information. The argument went that literally everything is an emergent property, since everything can be boiled down to more fundamental components. (I would argue that it is never actually used in this broad sense, but rather to indicate cases where relatively simple circumstances, when iterated enough times, give rise to much more complex interactions in ways which are difficult to fully model.)

Isn't this article using "reductionism" in exactly the same sense as "emergence" in the broad sense? It isn't actually using "reductionism" as a curiosity stopper, though. It isn't saying "airplanes work because of quarks", and leaving it at that, which is what "The Futility of Emergence" was warning against. Still, this highlights an interesting exception to the rationalists rule against statements which are always true. In terms of Bayes theorem, a statement which excludes nothing proves nothing. But if we aren't trying to provide new insights into specific phenomena, but only to make facts about the universe more explicit, then such statements can still serve such a purpose. This only holds true if the statement is falsifiable, though. If you make some generalization such as "free will is an emergent property" or "free will can be reduced to more fundamental components", such statements can still be falsified.

I guess the takeaway message from the two articles is not to accept things like "because quarks" as answers, but also to understand that "because quarks" is in fact correct. It's the answer (or one of the answers) that you'd eventually get if you just kept asking "why" until you got to the most fundamental underlying principles. We shouldn't look for our explanations only in terms of fundamentals or only in terms of more broad terms. If we want a full understanding, we need to examine all of the layers of the onion.

Minsky writing in Society of Mind might bring some light here (paraphrasing):

How can a box made of six boards hold a mouse when a mouse could just walk away from any individual board? No individual board has any "containment" or "mouse-tightness" on it's own. So is "containment" an emergent property?

Of course, it is the way a box prevents motion in all directions, because each board bars escape in a certain direction. The left side keeps the mouse from going left, the right from going right, the top keeps it from leaping out, and so on. The secret of a box is simply in how the boards are arranged to prevent motion in all directions!

That's what containing means. So it's silly to expect any separate board by itself to contain any containment, even though each contributes to the containing. It is like the cards of a straight flush in poker: only the full hand has any value at all.

"The same applies to words like life and mind. It is foolish to use these words for describing the smallest components of living things because these words were invented to describe how larger assemblies interact. Like boxing-in, words like living and thinking are useful for describing phenomena that result from certain combinations of relationships. The reason box seems nonmysterious is that everyone understands how the boards of a well-made box interact to prevent motion in any direction. In fact, the word life has already lost most of its mystery — at least for modern biologists, because they understand so many of the important interactions among the chemicals in cells. But mind still holds its mystery — because we still know so little about how mental agents interact to accomplish all the things they do."

This, as I see it, is the thesis of reductionism. Reductionism is not a positive belief, but rather, a disbelief that the higher levels of simplified multilevel models are out there in the territory.

The higher levels could have been, though. The fact that we have high-level abstractions in our heads does not by itself mean that there is nothing corresponding to them in the territory. (To make that argument is a version the fallacy that since there is a form of probability in the map, there can be none in the territory).

Tangential to the main point: one hypothesis for why the artillery gunner thought that "General relativity gives you the wrong answer", is that maybe he had an experience with a software which could either run "Newtonian mode" or "GR mode", and the software had to make approximations for the relativistic calculation to be roughly tractable (which might be nonetheless useful for roughly solving problems where relativistic effects matter, but would only reduce accuracy for non-relativistic situations).

Now, the "GR mode" (with approximations) would be a different model from real General Relativity, but could have given the gunner the impression that GR gives substantially different (and worse) answers from Newtonian mechanics in non-relativistic situations