It’s easy enough to see where Eliezer is going with this, but the foundation being laid isn’t terribly strong.
The dualist case is built for the possibility that—in this particular instance—scientific reductionism will fail. So to argue that reduction often works in other fields or changes the way we look at the world, etc. is perfectly valid, but totally redundant. Chalmers, for example, admits that right off the bat, with gusto. Not only does he accept that some things can be reductively explained, he argues that nearly everything—effectively everything but consciousness—can be reductively explained. The argument is that consciousness is different, not that experimental discoveries can’t have counterintuitive results.
So this is just so much straw, so far as I can see. It also continues the undercurrent of philosophy = bad and physics = good, which I assume exists because certain philosophical implications aren’t welcome here. I think this is rather distasteful, but I know I’m in the minority.
The “whole experiments may be surprising” knife cuts both ways. Sure, we’ll be surprised when seemingly irreducible phenomena turn out to be reductively explainable, should experiment show that. But we’ll also be surprised when seemingly reducible phenomena turn out to be irreducible, should experiment show that. Nothing in this post persuades in either direction.
The only real lesson is “consider the possibility that you might be wrong” which, while good advice, applies to both sides.
After all, it may well be that Eliezer’s inability to imagine that the dualist case is correct is just a reproduction of “an invisible assumption built into how his parietal cortex [i]s modeling space. [Hi]s imaginings [a]re evidence only about his imagination—grist for cognitive science, not physics.” Etc.
It’s easy enough to see where Eliezer is going with this, but the foundation being laid isn’t terribly strong.
The dualist case is built for the possibility that—in this particular instance—scientific reductionism will fail. So to argue that reduction often works in other fields or changes the way we look at the world, etc. is perfectly valid, but totally redundant. Chalmers, for example, admits that right off the bat, with gusto. Not only does he accept that some things can be reductively explained, he argues that nearly everything—effectively everything but consciousness—can be reductively explained. The argument is that consciousness is different, not that experimental discoveries can’t have counterintuitive results.
So this is just so much straw, so far as I can see. It also continues the undercurrent of philosophy = bad and physics = good, which I assume exists because certain philosophical implications aren’t welcome here. I think this is rather distasteful, but I know I’m in the minority.
The “whole experiments may be surprising” knife cuts both ways. Sure, we’ll be surprised when seemingly irreducible phenomena turn out to be reductively explainable, should experiment show that. But we’ll also be surprised when seemingly reducible phenomena turn out to be irreducible, should experiment show that. Nothing in this post persuades in either direction.
The only real lesson is “consider the possibility that you might be wrong” which, while good advice, applies to both sides.
After all, it may well be that Eliezer’s inability to imagine that the dualist case is correct is just a reproduction of “an invisible assumption built into how his parietal cortex [i]s modeling space. [Hi]s imaginings [a]re evidence only about his imagination—grist for cognitive science, not physics.” Etc.