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.
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.