If you generalize to optics, then it seems your condition for “exceeding physics” is “not efficiently readable from the microstate,” i.e.X is not a P-efficient function of the physical state.”But then it seems everything interesting exceeds physics: biological structure, weather, economic patterns, chemical reactions, turbulence, evolutionary dynamics, and all nontrivial macrostructure. I’m sort of fine with calling this “beyond” physics in some intuitive sense, but I don’t think that’s what you mean. What work does this non-efficiency do?
It means reductionism isn’t strictly true as ontology. I suppose it might be more precise to talk about “reductionist physics” than “physics”, although some might consider that redundant.
It isn’t obvious that biological structure isn’t efficiently readable from microstate. It at least doesn’t seem cryptographically hard, so polynomical time in general.
With turbulence you can pretty much read the current macrostate from the current microstate? You just can’t predict the future well.
I’d say homomorphic encryption computation facts, not just mental ones, are beyond physics in this sense. Other macro facts might be but it’s of course less clear.
Again, the same ontological status applies to homomorphic encryption and other entities. However the same epistemic status doesn’t apply. And the “efficiently determinable” criterion is an epistemic one.
A reason to pay attention to mental ones is that they are more salient as “hard to deny the existence of from some perspectives”. Whereas you could say a regular homomorphic encryption fact is “not real” in the sense of “not being there in the state of reality at the current time”.
It means reductionism isn’t strictly true as ontology.
I think you are working from an intuition of reductionism being wrong, but I’m still not clear about the details of your intuition. A defensible position could be that physics does not contain all the explanatorily relevant information or that reality has irreducible multi-level structure. But you seem to be saying that reductionism is false because subjective perspective is a fundamental ingredient, and you want to prove that via the efficiently computable argument. But I still think it doesn’t work. First, it proves too much.
It isn’t obvious that biological structure isn’t efficiently readable from microstate.
Agree that it is not obvious.
Other macro facts might be but it’s of course less clear.
But it seems pretty clear to me that most biological systems actually do involve dynamics that make it computationally infeasible for an external observer to reconstruct the macrostructure from microstructure observations at a given point. And we can’t appeal to ‘complete history’ to avoid the complexity, because with full history you could also recover the key in the HE case; the only difference is that HE compresses its relevant history into a small, opaque region.
What I do agree with you: Physics only tracks microstructure. But phenomenal awareness, meaning, macro-patterns, and information structure are not obviously reducible as descriptions to microstructure. The homomorphic case is a non-refutable illustration of this non-transparency.
But I disagree that this is caused by a failure of efficient computability; instead, we can see it as a failure of microphysical description to exhaust ontology. This matters because inefficiency is an epistemic constraint on observers, while ontology is about what needs to be included in the description of the world.
A defensible position could be that physics does not contain all the explanatorily relevant information or that reality has irreducible multi-level structure.
Close to what I mean. The multi-level structure is irreducible in that (a) it can’t be efficiently computed from microstates (b) it is in some cases observable, indicating it’s real. (Just (a) would be unsurprising, e.g. “the firth nth digits of Chaitin’s omega where n is the number of atoms in a table” is a high-level physical property that is not computable from microstate.)
But you seem to be saying that reductionism is false because subjective perspective is a fundamental ingredient
That’s not the claim. My argument wouldn’t work if in all cases, subjective perceptions could be efficiently computed from microstates. And it is possible for subjective perceptions to be efficiently computed from microstates without subjective perceptions being a “fundamental ingredient”. Rather I am vaguely suggesting something like neutral monism, where there is some fundamental ingredient explaining the physics lens and the mind lens.
But it seems pretty clear to me that most biological systems actually do involve dynamics that make it computationally infeasible for an external observer to reconstruct the macrostructure from microstructure observations at a given point.
It depends what kind of external observer you imagine right? Like if somehow we had a scan of a small animal down to the cellular level, there would be ordinary difficulties in re-constructing the macro-scale features from it, but none of them are clearly computationally hard (super-polynomial time).
But I disagree that this is caused by a failure of efficient computability; instead, we can see it as a failure of microphysical description to exhaust ontology. This matters because inefficiency is an epistemic constraint on observers, while ontology is about what needs to be included in the description of the world.
It seems like I entirely agree, not sure if I understood wrong. That is, I think path (c) is reasonably likely, and what it is saying is that there is more ontology than microphysics. It would be unsurprising for this to be the case, due to the way microphysical ontology, as methodology, is ok with dropping things that can be “in principle reconstrtucted”, hence tending towards the microscopic layer (as everything can be “in principle reconstructed” from there); ignoring computational costs to doing so, hence plausibly dropping things that are actually real from the ontology.
If you generalize to optics, then it seems your condition for “exceeding physics” is “not efficiently readable from the microstate,” i.e.X is not a P-efficient function of the physical state.”But then it seems everything interesting exceeds physics: biological structure, weather, economic patterns, chemical reactions, turbulence, evolutionary dynamics, and all nontrivial macrostructure. I’m sort of fine with calling this “beyond” physics in some intuitive sense, but I don’t think that’s what you mean. What work does this non-efficiency do?
It means reductionism isn’t strictly true as ontology. I suppose it might be more precise to talk about “reductionist physics” than “physics”, although some might consider that redundant.
It isn’t obvious that biological structure isn’t efficiently readable from microstate. It at least doesn’t seem cryptographically hard, so polynomical time in general.
With turbulence you can pretty much read the current macrostate from the current microstate? You just can’t predict the future well.
I’d say homomorphic encryption computation facts, not just mental ones, are beyond physics in this sense. Other macro facts might be but it’s of course less clear.
Again, the same ontological status applies to homomorphic encryption and other entities. However the same epistemic status doesn’t apply. And the “efficiently determinable” criterion is an epistemic one.
A reason to pay attention to mental ones is that they are more salient as “hard to deny the existence of from some perspectives”. Whereas you could say a regular homomorphic encryption fact is “not real” in the sense of “not being there in the state of reality at the current time”.
I think you are working from an intuition of reductionism being wrong, but I’m still not clear about the details of your intuition. A defensible position could be that physics does not contain all the explanatorily relevant information or that reality has irreducible multi-level structure. But you seem to be saying that reductionism is false because subjective perspective is a fundamental ingredient, and you want to prove that via the efficiently computable argument. But I still think it doesn’t work. First, it proves too much.
Agree that it is not obvious.
But it seems pretty clear to me that most biological systems actually do involve dynamics that make it computationally infeasible for an external observer to reconstruct the macrostructure from microstructure observations at a given point. And we can’t appeal to ‘complete history’ to avoid the complexity, because with full history you could also recover the key in the HE case; the only difference is that HE compresses its relevant history into a small, opaque region.
What I do agree with you: Physics only tracks microstructure. But phenomenal awareness, meaning, macro-patterns, and information structure are not obviously reducible as descriptions to microstructure. The homomorphic case is a non-refutable illustration of this non-transparency.
But I disagree that this is caused by a failure of efficient computability; instead, we can see it as a failure of microphysical description to exhaust ontology. This matters because inefficiency is an epistemic constraint on observers, while ontology is about what needs to be included in the description of the world.
Close to what I mean. The multi-level structure is irreducible in that (a) it can’t be efficiently computed from microstates (b) it is in some cases observable, indicating it’s real. (Just (a) would be unsurprising, e.g. “the firth nth digits of Chaitin’s omega where n is the number of atoms in a table” is a high-level physical property that is not computable from microstate.)
That’s not the claim. My argument wouldn’t work if in all cases, subjective perceptions could be efficiently computed from microstates. And it is possible for subjective perceptions to be efficiently computed from microstates without subjective perceptions being a “fundamental ingredient”. Rather I am vaguely suggesting something like neutral monism, where there is some fundamental ingredient explaining the physics lens and the mind lens.
It depends what kind of external observer you imagine right? Like if somehow we had a scan of a small animal down to the cellular level, there would be ordinary difficulties in re-constructing the macro-scale features from it, but none of them are clearly computationally hard (super-polynomial time).
It seems like I entirely agree, not sure if I understood wrong. That is, I think path (c) is reasonably likely, and what it is saying is that there is more ontology than microphysics. It would be unsurprising for this to be the case, due to the way microphysical ontology, as methodology, is ok with dropping things that can be “in principle reconstrtucted”, hence tending towards the microscopic layer (as everything can be “in principle reconstructed” from there); ignoring computational costs to doing so, hence plausibly dropping things that are actually real from the ontology.