“Mechanistic” and “reductionist” have somewhat poor branding, and this assertion is based on personal experience rather than rigorous data. Many people I know will associate “mechanistic” and “reductionist” with negative notions, such as “life is inherently meaningless” or “living beings are just machines”, etcetera.
Wording matters and I can explain the same idea using different wording and get drastically different responses from my interlocutor.
I agree that “gears-level“ is confusing to someone unfamiliar with the concept. Naming is hard. A better name could be “precise causal model”.
But mechanistic world models do suggest that meaning in a traditional (mystical? I can’t really define it, as I find the concept itself incoherent) sense does not (and cannot) exist; so I think the “negative” connotations are pretty fair, it’s just that they aren’t that negative or important in the first place. (“Everything adds up to normalcy.”) Rebranding is still a sound marketing move, of course.
In some sense, yeah, “life is inherently meaningless” and “living beings are just machines.” However, I am still struggling to wrap my head around the objectivity of aesthetics, meaning and morality. Information is now widely considered physical (refer to papers by R Landauer and D Deutsch). Maybe someday, we will once and for all incorporate aesthetics, meaning and morality under physicalism. If minds are physical, and aesthetics, purposes, and morality are real aspects of minds, then wouldn’t that imply that they are therefore objective notions? And thus not “meaningless”?
This is a gnarly rabbit hole, and I am not qualified to talk about this topic. I recently read Parfit’s “Reasons and Persons” to gain a deeper grasp of these topics and it’s a stunning and precious book, but I need to do more work to understand all this. I may have to read his magnum opus “On What Matters” to wrap my head around this. We don’t have a proper understanding of minds at this point in time. Developing robust theories about rationality, morality, aesthetics, desires, etc., necessitates actually understanding minds.
As you’ve pointed out, marketing matters. In my view, this is part of the reason why epistemic and instrumental rationalities are distinct aspects of rationality as defined in the sequences. If your goal is to explain an idea to your interlocutor and you can convey the same truth using different wording, with one wording leading to mutual understanding and the other leading to obstinacy, then the instrumentally rational thing to do would be to use the former wording. Here we have a situation where two things are epistemically equivalent but not instrumentally so.
“Mechanistic” and “reductionist” have somewhat poor branding, and this assertion is based on personal experience rather than rigorous data. Many people I know will associate “mechanistic” and “reductionist” with negative notions, such as “life is inherently meaningless” or “living beings are just machines”, etcetera.
Wording matters and I can explain the same idea using different wording and get drastically different responses from my interlocutor.
I agree that “gears-level“ is confusing to someone unfamiliar with the concept. Naming is hard. A better name could be “precise causal model”.
But mechanistic world models do suggest that meaning in a traditional (mystical? I can’t really define it, as I find the concept itself incoherent) sense does not (and cannot) exist; so I think the “negative” connotations are pretty fair, it’s just that they aren’t that negative or important in the first place. (“Everything adds up to normalcy.”) Rebranding is still a sound marketing move, of course.
In some sense, yeah, “life is inherently meaningless” and “living beings are just machines.” However, I am still struggling to wrap my head around the objectivity of aesthetics, meaning and morality. Information is now widely considered physical (refer to papers by R Landauer and D Deutsch). Maybe someday, we will once and for all incorporate aesthetics, meaning and morality under physicalism. If minds are physical, and aesthetics, purposes, and morality are real aspects of minds, then wouldn’t that imply that they are therefore objective notions? And thus not “meaningless”?
This is a gnarly rabbit hole, and I am not qualified to talk about this topic. I recently read Parfit’s “Reasons and Persons” to gain a deeper grasp of these topics and it’s a stunning and precious book, but I need to do more work to understand all this. I may have to read his magnum opus “On What Matters” to wrap my head around this. We don’t have a proper understanding of minds at this point in time. Developing robust theories about rationality, morality, aesthetics, desires, etc., necessitates actually understanding minds.
As you’ve pointed out, marketing matters. In my view, this is part of the reason why epistemic and instrumental rationalities are distinct aspects of rationality as defined in the sequences. If your goal is to explain an idea to your interlocutor and you can convey the same truth using different wording, with one wording leading to mutual understanding and the other leading to obstinacy, then the instrumentally rational thing to do would be to use the former wording. Here we have a situation where two things are epistemically equivalent but not instrumentally so.