I do agree, but I’m far less confident than you about the completeness of my mapping of macro experiences to sub-micro state. Remember, the vast majority of physics knowledge is not calculated bottom-up from quantum measurements and statistics, it’s actually measured at the macro level and assumed to (and occasionally confirmed in very VERY specific instances) have come from these lower levels.
I still find it easy to reject invisible pink dragons, but I lean much more on macro-level irrelevance than on lack of low-level physics modeling.
This is fair, though the lack of experiments showing the existence of anything macro that doesn’t map to sub-micro state also adds a lot of confidence, in my opinion, since the amount of hours humans have put into performing scientific experiments is quite high at this point.
Generally I’d say that the macro-level irrelevance of an assumption means that you can reject it out of hand, and lack of micro-level modelling means that there is work to be done until we understand how to model it that way.
This is fair, though the lack of experiments showing the existence of anything macro that doesn’t map to sub-micro state also adds a lot of confidence,
There are things that don’t have reductive explanations. We didn’t get a reductive explanation of consciousness the day we found out brains a re made of neurons. Whether “map to” means “explained by” is another question.
I haven’t used the word “reduce” since you gave a definition of it in the other thread which didn’t match the precise meaning I was aiming for. The meaning I am aiming for is given in this paragraph from this post:
If we take as assumption that everything humans have observed has been made up of smaller physical parts (except possibly for the current elementary particles du jour, but that doesn’t matter for the sake of this argument) and that the macro state is entirely determined by the micro state (regardless of if it’s easy to compute for humans), there is a simple conclusion that follows logically from that.
It doesn’t matter if we have found an explanation for consciousness yet. We still know with high confidence that it has to be entirely determined by the small physical components of the brain, so we can have high confidence that any attempted explanation will be wrong if it relies on the existence of other things than the physical components.
I do agree, but I’m far less confident than you about the completeness of my mapping of macro experiences to sub-micro state. Remember, the vast majority of physics knowledge is not calculated bottom-up from quantum measurements and statistics, it’s actually measured at the macro level and assumed to (and occasionally confirmed in very VERY specific instances) have come from these lower levels.
I still find it easy to reject invisible pink dragons, but I lean much more on macro-level irrelevance than on lack of low-level physics modeling.
This is fair, though the lack of experiments showing the existence of anything macro that doesn’t map to sub-micro state also adds a lot of confidence, in my opinion, since the amount of hours humans have put into performing scientific experiments is quite high at this point.
Generally I’d say that the macro-level irrelevance of an assumption means that you can reject it out of hand, and lack of micro-level modelling means that there is work to be done until we understand how to model it that way.
There are things that don’t have reductive explanations. We didn’t get a reductive explanation of consciousness the day we found out brains a re made of neurons. Whether “map to” means “explained by” is another question.
I haven’t used the word “reduce” since you gave a definition of it in the other thread which didn’t match the precise meaning I was aiming for. The meaning I am aiming for is given in this paragraph from this post:
It doesn’t matter if we have found an explanation for consciousness yet. We still know with high confidence that it has to be entirely determined by the small physical components of the brain, so we can have high confidence that any attempted explanation will be wrong if it relies on the existence of other things than the physical components.