More helpfully, there is one prediction of reductionism that you can distinguish from any sense of “the bottom level”: the notion that, for any two phenomena, there is a lower level of description that explains both of them. Indeed, this is what people typically deny when they deny reductionism- they believe that (for example) matter is explained by one kind of rules, and consciousness is explained by another, and there’s not a single explanatory level below both.
I think it reasonably likely that there will turn out to be a bottom level, but even if it’s turtles all the way down, there’s at most one turtle-tree.
This was a very helpful answer, and you’re right. It isn’t so much that we can’t currently explain whether something underlies amplitude that bugs people. It’s more that they want some way to rationalize that it is plausible for their favorite phenomena to also be like amplitude in the sense of not having an as-of-yet-describable lower level explanation. Then they think separate magisteria allows them to claim that the inexplicability of their favorite phenomena has equal footing as the inexplicability of quantum amplitude.
I can’t believe that nobody’s mentioned the mathematical universe hypothesis yet...
More helpfully, there is one prediction of reductionism that you can distinguish from any sense of “the bottom level”: the notion that, for any two phenomena, there is a lower level of description that explains both of them. Indeed, this is what people typically deny when they deny reductionism- they believe that (for example) matter is explained by one kind of rules, and consciousness is explained by another, and there’s not a single explanatory level below both.
I think it reasonably likely that there will turn out to be a bottom level, but even if it’s turtles all the way down, there’s at most one turtle-tree.
This was a very helpful answer, and you’re right. It isn’t so much that we can’t currently explain whether something underlies amplitude that bugs people. It’s more that they want some way to rationalize that it is plausible for their favorite phenomena to also be like amplitude in the sense of not having an as-of-yet-describable lower level explanation. Then they think separate magisteria allows them to claim that the inexplicability of their favorite phenomena has equal footing as the inexplicability of quantum amplitude.