Building on what TimS said, I would make a lot fewer assumptions if you explained things as you would to a toddler rather than express complex ideas in five highly ambiguous words and then complain I didn’t interpret each word exactly the way you meant to.
You still haven’t answered the question of why nature looks a whole lot like it has laws. Even if true, how can you possibly know that the model we have tested ten thousand times and confirmed each time is a surface model and not the truth?
Can Nature disobey, for example, her own “laws”? It looks like she can, because what we have come to is an understanding of probability.
Disagree. First, a probabilistic law is still a law; take nondeterministic Turing machines for example. Second, with the exception of some interpretations of QM, probabilistic models claim to be approximations of the true (or still approximate but a level deeper) laws when the human trying to use it lacks information or time to compute. Sometimes we find nature disobeying situation A’s law in situation B, but there always turns out to be a law that governs A, B, and C.
However, you can believe that Nature does follow laws if you like.
Clearly we’re not using “believe” the same way.
if you believe what you have created, as if Nature were bound by the :”laws” you have inferred—and, hopefully, tested—you will become less able to see the exceptions. If by any chance, you notice one (the cards are stacked against it), you will dismiss it as some error.
I call bullshit. Physicists catch exceptions to current theories all the time, and then work hard to find where it came from, and either devise new theories or fix the loose cable in their setup. Where’s the list of exceptions discovered by mysterians?
So I have interpreted “reductionism” in a way that makes it—to me—right.
You should probably interpret it as “what most reductionists advocate” and use “the version of reductionism I think is right” for the other thing, if you hope to talk to people who call themselves reductionists without making them shout “What the actual fuck?”.
Building on what TimS said, I would make a lot fewer assumptions if you explained things as you would to a toddler rather than express complex ideas in five highly ambiguous words and then complain I didn’t interpret each word exactly the way you meant to.
You still haven’t answered the question of why nature looks a whole lot like it has laws. Even if true, how can you possibly know that the model we have tested ten thousand times and confirmed each time is a surface model and not the truth?
Disagree. First, a probabilistic law is still a law; take nondeterministic Turing machines for example. Second, with the exception of some interpretations of QM, probabilistic models claim to be approximations of the true (or still approximate but a level deeper) laws when the human trying to use it lacks information or time to compute. Sometimes we find nature disobeying situation A’s law in situation B, but there always turns out to be a law that governs A, B, and C.
Clearly we’re not using “believe” the same way.
I call bullshit. Physicists catch exceptions to current theories all the time, and then work hard to find where it came from, and either devise new theories or fix the loose cable in their setup. Where’s the list of exceptions discovered by mysterians?
You should probably interpret it as “what most reductionists advocate” and use “the version of reductionism I think is right” for the other thing, if you hope to talk to people who call themselves reductionists without making them shout “What the actual fuck?”.