Le 11-mars-07, à 17:56, Stathis Papaioannou a écrit :
> Reductionism means breaking something up into simpler parts to explain
> it. What's wrong with that?
Because, assuming comp, neither matter nor mind (including perception)
can be break up into simpler parts to be explained. That is what UDA is
all about. First person expection (both on mind and matter) are already
global notion relying on the whole UD*.
And empirical physics, currently quantum mechanics, confirms that
indeed, we cannot explain matter by breaking it into parts. That is
what "violation of bell's inequality" or more generally "quantum
information " is all about. This has been my first "confirmation of
comp by nature": non-locality is the easiest consequence of comp.
A good (and actually very deep) analogy is provided by the structure of
knots (see the table of knots:
http://www.math.utoronto.ca/~drorbn/KAtlas/Knots/index.html
A knot is closed in its mathematical definition (unlike shoe tangle).
You cannot break a knot in smaller parts, so that the whole structure
is explained by the parts. Knots, like many topological structure,
contains irreductible global information. The same for the notion of
computations (and indeed those notions have deep relationship, see the
following two impressive papers:
http://web.comlab.ox.ac.uk/oucl/work/samson.abramsky/tambook.pdf
http://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0606114
I know that Derek Parfit call "comp" the reductionist view". this is a
very misleading use of vocabulary. Comp is the simplest destroyer of
any reductionist attempt to understand anything, not just humans.
Bruno
>
> On 3/12/07, Bruno Marchal < marchal.domain.name.hidden> wrote:
>> Le 10-mars-07, à 18:42, John M a écrit :
>>
>> > I don't deny the usefulness of science (even if it is reductionist)
>> ...
>>
>>
>> How could science be reductionist? Science is the art of making
>> hypotheses enough clear so as to make them doubtable and eventually
>> testable.
>>
>> No scientist will ever say there is a primitive physical universe or
>> an
>> ultimate God, or anything like that. All theories are hypothetical,
>> including "grandmother's one when asserting that the sun will rise
>> tomorrow. The roots of our confidence in such or such theories are
>> complex matter.
>>
>> Don't confuse science with the human approximation of it. Something
>> quite interesting per se, also, but which develops itself.
>> Lobian approximations of it are also rich of surprise, about
>> "oneself".
>>
>> "Science" or better, the scientific attitude, invites us to listen to
>> what the machine can say and dream of, nowadays. How could such an
>> invitation be reductionist?
>>
>> I would say science is modesty. It is what makes faith necessary and
>> possible.
>>
>> With comp, when science or reason grows polynomially (in a trip from G
>> to G* for example), then faith "has to" grow super-exponentially.
>
>
> >
>
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
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Received on Mon Mar 12 2007 - 06:00:23 PDT