How to deal (in terms of life)

[Darkneos]

We can't get outside of our own minds and see the external territory directly. That sounds like direct realism deep down, the position that "rational", "lesswrong" people no longer take imo.

Direct realism is dead, rather the remaining debate is between indirect realism (we experience a representation in our head, that lets us infer what the territory is like to some degree, but technically things like quarks and quantum fields are also just representations in our head), and that horrific Kantian philosophy (we can't infer anything at all about the territory, so we just have to guess that there are other minds and they work the same way as ours). I subscribe to indirect realism of course which is also the scientific position, but philosophy forums are home to many Kantians.

Map vs territory is also used for contrasting two or more levels of thinking in our head: the concrete perception of the world and abstract thinking about that perception, there can be one or more abstraction layers.

Well that was something else I thought of too. We don't directly experience reality, so talking about what it "really is" is just another story.

I dunno, I'm still kinda wonky from it. I'm trying to find a way to resolve it because I keep regarding people as not people.

Well we do directly experience a part of reality, the representation in our head. It's not that people aren't people, but that there is the noumenal person "out there" and the representation "in here" that we experience. So there are actually two.

And in evedyday life we can forget about all this stuff and just go back to living life as direct realists. So people are people. It's the optimal philosophy imo. I just drop most of these insights most of the time. No one in my workplace for example has any idea that I'm into philosophy.

I get that there might be "two" but IMO there is just the one, I understand what you're saying though. But I'm more trying to argue against Lesswrong here.

It's not exactly a new idea, Plato's cave and all that, but...I don't really see the use in worrying about it. Speaking for myself, there are people, there is a world, etc, and that's enough for me. We could argue about whether the representation is reality or not, but...I dunno, it just doesn't sound compelling.

Because then what would you do if you found out? It was like with what I was saying about what would I do if I found the truth of reality and had no answer. Because personally...I don't have a life. And I'm finding out that just wanting to "be right" is a poor substitute for living life.

[Darkneos]

If reduction is always "explaining away", then surely anyone who understands how a car works would think that cars don't exist.

Cars clearly aren't fundamental objects. They work by the interaction of many moving pieces. There are people out there - not me! - who understand how all those moving pieces work together to make the car go when you press the gas pedal.

Those people fully understand how to "reduce" a car into its component parts, and they all still think cars exist.

So reducing something big into the behaviour of its pieces isn't an argument that that big thing "doesn't exist". Something doesn't have to be fundamental to exist.

That's what reduction is, explaining away, which is what he is doing.

Then why does the writer in question go through all that effort to distinguish between explaining vs explaining away? It seems like you're projecting your own understandings onto him

I read that but he literally puts no effort into making that distinction, and spends most of it harping on the importance of seeing through the illusion. Where in there does he make a convincing point between the two? The stuff about gnomes is hyperbole, and he still goes back to the point about planes.

[Darkneos]

Well that was something else I thought of too. We don't directly experience reality, so talking about what it "really is" is just another story.

I dunno, I'm still kinda wonky from it. I'm trying to find a way to resolve it because I keep regarding people as not people.

Well we do directly experience a part of reality, the representation in our head. It's not that people aren't people, but that there is the noumenal person "out there" and the representation "in here" that we experience. So there are actually two.

And in evedyday life we can forget about all this stuff and just go back to living life as direct realists. So people are people. It's the optimal philosophy imo. I just drop most of these insights most of the time. No one in my workplace for example has any idea that I'm into philosophy.

I get that there might be "two" but IMO there is just the one, I understand what you're saying though. But I'm more trying to argue against Lesswrong here. But I wouldn't necessarily say there are two, and while Kant had a point it's still just speculation.

It's not exactly a new idea, Plato's cave and all that, but...I don't really see the use in worrying about it. Speaking for myself, there are people, there is a world, etc, and that's enough for me. We could argue about whether the representation is reality or not, but...I dunno, it just doesn't sound compelling.

I wouldn't call it an insight, more like old news. There's a couple or 10 philosophers in every age that come up with the same idea. Plato and the Cave, The Butterfly, it's a common problem in philosophy about whether we experience reality as it is. Even neuroscience shows the same, that our brains construct a model of reality based on sense data. But even thought it is that there is still a car coming at you and if you eat a rock it will still break your teeth, so I'm just wondering why we bother with that doubt.

Because then what would you do if you found out? It was like with what I was saying about what would I do if I found the truth of reality and had no answer. Because personally...I don't have a life. And I'm finding out that just wanting to "be right" is a poor substitute for living life.

[Darkneos]

We can't get outside of our own minds and see the external territory directly. That sounds like direct realism deep down, the position that "rational", "lesswrong" people no longer take imo.

Direct realism is dead, rather the remaining debate is between indirect realism (we experience a representation in our head, that lets us infer what the territory is like to some degree, but technically things like quarks and quantum fields are also just representations in our head), and that horrific Kantian philosophy (we can't infer anything at all about the territory, so we just have to guess that there are other minds and they work the same way as ours). I subscribe to indirect realism of course which is also the scientific position, but philosophy forums are home to many Kantians.

Map vs territory is also used for contrasting two or more levels of thinking in our head: the concrete perception of the world and abstract thinking about that perception, there can be one or more abstraction layers.

Well that was something else I thought of too. We don't directly experience reality, so talking about what it "really is" is just another story.

I dunno, I'm still kinda wonky from it. I'm trying to find a way to resolve it because I keep regarding people as not people.

Well we do directly experience a part of reality, the representation in our head. It's not that people aren't people, but that there is the noumenal person "out there" and the representation "in here" that we experience. So there are actually two.

And in evedyday life we can forget about all this stuff and just go back to living life as direct realists. So people are people. It's the optimal philosophy imo. I just drop most of these insights most of the time. No one in my workplace for example has any idea that I'm into philosophy.

I get that there might be "two" but IMO there is just the one, I understand what you're saying though. But I'm more trying to argue against Lesswrong here. But I wouldn't necessarily say there are two, and while Kant had a point it's still just speculation.

It's not exactly a new idea, Plato's cave and all that, but...I don't really see the use in worrying about it. Speaking for myself, there are people, there is a world, etc, and that's enough for me. We could argue about whether the representation is reality or not, but...I dunno, it just doesn't sound compelling.

I wouldn't call it an insight, more like old news. There's a couple or 10 philosophers in every age that come up with the same idea. Plato and the Cave, The Butterfly, it's a common problem in philosophy about whether we experience reality as it is. Even neuroscience shows the same, that our brains construct a model of reality based on sense data. But even thought it is that there is still a car coming at you and if you eat a rock it will still break your teeth, so I'm just wondering why we bother with that doubt.

Because then what would you do if you found out? It was like with what I was saying about what would I do if I found the truth of reality and had no answer. Because personally...I don't have a life. And I'm finding out that just wanting to "be right" is a poor substitute for living life.

EDIT: Double post, couldn't figure out how to get rid of the quotes.

EDIT 2: From the Buddhist perspective the distinction between "real" and "not real" is illusory, since all we have is experience. So in a weird sense everything is real, or so they told me.

[Flannel Jesus]

I think he pretty clearly draws a distinction between the two. You can't read the first half of it and think that he thinks there's no difference between the two. He talks about how the visual experience of a mirage is explained away, but the visual experience of socks is just explained - some things, when you understand them properly, disappear from your understanding of the world, and other things don't. Do you know why understanding a mirage would make something disappear from your understanding of the world, but understanding other visual experiences wouldn't?

[Darkneos]

I think he pretty clearly draws a distinction between the two. You can't read the first half of it and think that he thinks there's no difference between the two. He talks about how the visual experience of a mirage is explained away, but the visual experience of socks is just explained - some things, when you understand them properly, disappear from your understanding of the world, and other things don't. Do you know why understanding a mirage would make something disappear from your understanding of the world, but understanding other visual experiences wouldn't?

I mean...there is no distinction, he just seems to be arbitrarily drawing one. The lake in the desert is based on an assumption he's making.

Even this line:

(I.e: There's no way you can model a 747 quark-by-quark, so you've got to use a multi-level map with explicit cognitive representations of wings, airflow, and so on. This doesn't mean there's a multi-level territory. The true laws of physics, to the best of our knowledge, are only over elementary particle fields.)

"True laws of physics" is doing a lot of heavy lifting there, because we don't have them. We have models for different uses, that's it. He's appealing to a territory that does not exist, and picking on model to the exclusion of everything else.

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/cphoF8n ... ining-away

Tracing back the chain of causality, step by step, I discover that my belief that I'm wearing socks is fully explained by the fact that I'm wearing socks... On the other hand, if I see a mirage of a lake in the desert, the correct causal explanation of my vision does not involve the fact of any actual lake in the desert. In this case, my belief in the lake is not just explained, but explained away.

But you can explain how a cognitive process works without it being "mere"! My belief that I'm wearing socks is a mere result of my visual cortex reconstructing nerve impulses sent from my retina which received photons reflected off my socks... which is to say, according to scientific reductionism, my belief that I'm wearing socks is a mere result of the fact that I'm wearing socks.

He's making special pleadings in order for his case to work, arbitrarily assigning some things as real and some as models and some as territory, when the fact is it applies to everything he's talking about, even the fact you're wearing socks.

He doesn't make the distinction.

The point about a mirage is that you don't know it is one until you check. In the case of things it does make them disappear from your understanding of the world because according to him there are no things, merely patterns of atoms. Once you do that then people stop being people and cars stop being cars.

It's incoherent when you drill down.

[Flannel Jesus]

It's incoherent when you drill down.

Whether you think it's incoherent is not relevant, because we're talking about *what he thinks*. You said reductionists think that once something is reduced, it doesn't exist. He's clearly not saying that, because he's drawing a distinction between explaining vs explaining away. Regardless of whether or not you think that distinction is coherent, it's still the case that he thinks there's a distinction there - and he's making the distinction clearly to say that not all reduction is explaining away, some reduction is just explaining.

So it doesn't matter that it doesn't make sense to you, it's factually incorrect to say that all reductionists reduce to explain away - they don't. That's now how they conceptualize reduction. That's how YOU, a non-reductionist, conceptualize it - but you aren't in charge of reductionism, you aren't even a reductionist so how could you be?

Put reductionism aside for a sec and just ask yourself, do you personally think something has to be fundamental to be real? Can non-fundamental things be "real" in any sense?

[Flannel Jesus]

I wonder why it is that chat gpt thinks that reductionism doesn't imply what you think it implies...

https://chatgpt.com/c/682510cd-ca50-800 ... c789d608b6

[Walker]

Looking at it all I think it might be best to get to a mental hospital and get the help I need.

I have a lurking suspicion that it might not be the thoughts themselves but some underlying problem. Either way, I need serious professional help.

How is sometimes just a mixed up wHo.

[Darkneos]

I wonder why it is that chat gpt thinks that reductionism doesn't imply what you think it implies...

https://chatgpt.com/c/682510cd-ca50-800 ... c789d608b6

ChatGPT isn't able to answer that question, or many questions to be honest.

[Darkneos]

It's incoherent when you drill down.

Whether you think it's incoherent is not relevant, because we're talking about *what he thinks*. You said reductionists think that once something is reduced, it doesn't exist. He's clearly not saying that, because he's drawing a distinction between explaining vs explaining away. Regardless of whether or not you think that distinction is coherent, it's still the case that he thinks there's a distinction there - and he's making the distinction clearly to say that not all reduction is explaining away, some reduction is just explaining.

So it doesn't matter that it doesn't make sense to you, it's factually incorrect to say that all reductionists reduce to explain away - they don't. That's now how they conceptualize reduction. That's how YOU, a non-reductionist, conceptualize it - but you aren't in charge of reductionism, you aren't even a reductionist so how could you be?

Put reductionism aside for a sec and just ask yourself, do you personally think something has to be fundamental to be real? Can non-fundamental things be "real" in any sense?

He is clearly saying that as it is with the other people making comments on his blog, I just gave two examples. He's also not making the distinction clearly, only just arbitrarily choosing what it applies to and what doesn't, which is special pleading.

One doesn't have to be a reductionist to see that, and it could be an internal inconsistency within the language. Like Alta was saying, by what reductionism is saying this sentence does not exist. If other people see the holes in your philosophy and you just insist it's not the case without really proving it (like he and you are doing) then it's a problem with the thought school and not them.

We aren't talking about me, we are talking about him. There is only one fundamental reality and nothing else is real, just an abstracted model of everything. Hence that line about him saying there are no wings or plane even if someone claims to see them:

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. Understanding this on a gut level dissolves the question of "How can you say the airplane doesn't really have wings, when I can see the wings right there?" The critical words are really and see.

[Atla]

Well that was something else I thought of too. We don't directly experience reality, so talking about what it "really is" is just another story.

I dunno, I'm still kinda wonky from it. I'm trying to find a way to resolve it because I keep regarding people as not people.

Well we do directly experience a part of reality, the representation in our head. It's not that people aren't people, but that there is the noumenal person "out there" and the representation "in here" that we experience. So there are actually two.

And in evedyday life we can forget about all this stuff and just go back to living life as direct realists. So people are people. It's the optimal philosophy imo. I just drop most of these insights most of the time. No one in my workplace for example has any idea that I'm into philosophy.

I get that there might be "two" but IMO there is just the one, I understand what you're saying though. But I'm more trying to argue against Lesswrong here. But I wouldn't necessarily say there are two, and while Kant had a point it's still just speculation.

It's not exactly a new idea, Plato's cave and all that, but...I don't really see the use in worrying about it. Speaking for myself, there are people, there is a world, etc, and that's enough for me. We could argue about whether the representation is reality or not, but...I dunno, it just doesn't sound compelling.

I wouldn't call it an insight, more like old news. There's a couple or 10 philosophers in every age that come up with the same idea. Plato and the Cave, The Butterfly, it's a common problem in philosophy about whether we experience reality as it is. Even neuroscience shows the same, that our brains construct a model of reality based on sense data. But even thought it is that there is still a car coming at you and if you eat a rock it will still break your teeth, so I'm just wondering why we bother with that doubt.

Because then what would you do if you found out? It was like with what I was saying about what would I do if I found the truth of reality and had no answer. Because personally...I don't have a life. And I'm finding out that just wanting to "be right" is a poor substitute for living life.

EDIT: Double post, couldn't figure out how to get rid of the quotes.

EDIT 2: From the Buddhist perspective the distinction between "real" and "not real" is illusory, since all we have is experience. So in a weird sense everything is real, or so they told me.

Then everything is equally speculation, I don't see the point of that approach. Indirect realism is 100% consistent with available evidence and is Occam friendly, so it wins for me.

Who said anything about being "right" being a substitute for living life?

[Atla]

Can non-fundamental things be "real" in any sense?

When it comes to concrete objects such as cars, a resounding no. When a car is non-fundamental then it can't be "real".

[Darkneos]

Can non-fundamental things be "real" in any sense?

When it comes to concrete objects such as cars, a resounding no. When a car is non-fundamental then it can't be "real".

You lost me there...

Then everything is equally speculation, I don't see the point of that approach. Indirect realism is 100% consistent with available evidence and is Occam friendly, so it wins for me.

Who said anything about being "right" being a substitute for living life?

Well no one, I'm just musing about my life so far and what I've done and I've realized how much I was wasting it trying to be better than other people or always being right. At the end of the day I wasn't happy, or fulfilled, it was hollow (and often I wasn't right).

When it comes to Occam's Razor I don't generally regard that as a metric for truth, humans like it when things are simple but that doesn't mean they are.

I do accept indirect realism as that is what neuroscience and psychology seems to suggest.

But yeah, everything is equally speculation. All we have are models to navigate the world like you said, and like you said Eliezer is just arbitrarily choosing one to be "reality" and throwing the rest out.

[Flannel Jesus]

I wonder why it is that chat gpt thinks that reductionism doesn't imply what you think it implies...

https://chatgpt.com/c/682510cd-ca50-800 ... c789d608b6

ChatGPT isn't able to answer that question, or many questions to be honest.

Chat gpt is pretty good at answering about the meaning of words, especially common ones. Reductionism is a common topic in philosophy, I think Mr gpt has got the right end of the stick here. You should take a step back from your overconfidence for just a minute and wonder if maybe the reductionist you're talking to might possibly know more about reductionism than you do.

You've got one high profile reductionist literally telling you he thinks there's a difference between explaining and explaining away, which your overconfidence is telling you to just entirely ignore for some reason. You've got one talking to you now, here, telling you he also believes there's a difference between explaining and explaining away, and that reductionism doesn't mean you have to believe only fundamental things are real. You've got a large language model, whose speciality is one thing: language, telling you that the meaning of reductionism doesn't necessitate denying the existence of non fundamental things. None of that gives your overconfidence pause? Come on dude, be serious.

Even Wikipedia spells it out for you

Reductionism does not preclude the existence of what might be termed emergent phenomena