I got a few pages into this book and it was already quite challenging, in the sense of "challenging to take the author seriously as having something worth saying". He struck me as being the kind of person that caused Eliezer to rant about "emergence".
...just read a couple more pages. Am now on page 7. Still very challenging.
I think I can say "enough" for this line of thinking. I think my conclusions can be summarized as "My worldview is ontologically reductionistic but absolutely *not* methodologically reductionistic. (In particular, I reject mental agents as ontologically basic). Kauffman appears to confuse these two kinds of reductionism, which is perhaps somewhat annoying but he may still have much to teach me about methodological reductionism."
I'm going to start at the beginning of the book again, with all of this in mind, and see how I feel reading it :P
(I still don't quite even know what it *means* for "a couple in love on the banks of the Seine" to be more than whatever it is they are made of. but maybe my concept of "is" is still reductionistic on some level? and maybe there's another way to conceive of "is"?
holy shit, I was literally on the other side of this like 20 minutes ago, thinking "I'm gonna start reading again, but (*ugh*) it might have to require me to fucking redefine terms like "real"" And I was pretty pissed about that. Whereas as I wrote the paragraph above I was feeling pretty creative and curious and open.
But then I read the paragraph at the top of p4, which said "agency has emerged in evolution and cannot be deduced by physics" and I'm like hnnnngh.
I think a lot of this is due to my understandings of simple white-box systems that produce statistical phenomena equivalent to many of the complex systems he's describing
but I guess there's a difference between being able to white-box economic statistics and being able to white-box full on economic trends and inventions and so on.
...the page 4-5 spread is still pretty hard to read.
I'm noting though that part of this seems actually less frame-based and more belief-based. he's making claims about things science/physics can/can't do, and I apparently believe that it can. but why?
ohhhhh the glimpse of insight, looking at p3 at the bottom
it seems so obvious having glimpsed it. he's basically saying "we have to model these things as being "real" on their own, because we can't understand them reductively, and they're sure as hell not not part of reality"
I feel like I may have disagreements about what in fact is reducible, but I can see what he's pointing at on an abstract level, sure.
*Malcolm looks at p3 again*
Right! And this shift is actually thus necessary, because we *do* want to understand and explain what is, and thus if there are things we can't understand in terms of their parts, we need a different way to think about them such that they're part of what is and therefore part of the domain of what is to be understood
from this perspective, it's almost like it's reductionism that looks anti-scientific or something
...one of the anti-reductionist errors (a partitcular un-favorite of Eliezer's) might be called the Emergence Fallacy: the tendency to hide explanations under "emergence".
(another error would be some sort of symbolism -> causality failure)
astrology makes this one big time
reductionism solves it by saying "well, there's no meaningful way for those stars to exert any relevant causal influence on you except via your own beliefs about them"
I think that post-reductionism would solve it in a pretty similar way: AH! the laws of physics may not allow us to accurately predict what complex systems will do, but they CAN allow us to predict
the types of statistical behaviors complex systems might exhibit
the types of phenomena that will NOT be observed, either in complex or simple systems. and one of these is causality through non-physical means (which need to be specified for this to be a meaningful sentence... and which could of course themselves be wrong or misunderstood (eg dark matter maybe); but complex systems don't *break* this on their own)
the behavior of complex systems may not be able to be productively explained or predicted on the level of particles, waves, quantum configurations, but it is still happening there
relatedly/equivalently: things may be composed of a nonlinear combination/relationship of their parts, but they are still made of those parts and not other things (I think!?)
yeah, they don't *break* physical laws;
(
#blogpost a sequence on post-reductionism would be pretty fucking cool)
this is related to the psychics follow-up post on LW (linked above I think)
let's start at the beginning again, having had that insight. even though I didn't make it to p7 again. I think maybe I'll only keep reading when I stop feeling stuck on these pages. It feels cool that I'm relating to that stuckness excitedly, as a sign of learning/understanding available, etc
(aside: it is certainly NOT helping matters, from my perspective, that Kauffman is bringing up the science vs religion debate here. it seems very very very clear to me that a religion is an incidental part of human history)
(it seems that other possible points of contention may include something like
p3: "a central implication of this new worldview is that we are co-creators of a universe, biosphere, and culture of endlessly novel complexity"