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The different levels emerge from each other. And I don't think that we can be sure to have found the most basic one, or even to assume that there is a most basi

by dorgo 10y ago

The different levels emerge from each other. And I don't think that we can be sure to have found the most basic one, or even to assume that there is a most basic level. But the emergent levels are not less 'real' than the more basic ones. There is more about emergent levels than just to hide details.

barrkel 10y ago
Different abstraction levels are normally different ways of talking about the same physical phenomena. That is, they are parallel; they don't stack. The most basic one is the one that doesn't exist in our heads and doesn't have a model with predictions to violate. What does "real" mean here? I'm using it as a proxy for truth, or perhaps better, accuracy in a model. That is, if a model of the world makes predictions about the world, the model is "real" to the degree that the predictions are correct. But all human models of the world have their limits, usually forced by our tiny little brains and meagre data input senses. We take something that we've decided to categorize, and create symbols to represent commonalities, and theorize relations between the symbols, and test these theories, and gradually refine a calculus of symbols that we can use to apply to the world, and the system works, in so far as the commonalities stay common, and the symbols aim squarely at the average of the referents. But it's not reality; it's all made up, like mathematics. It's just a story, it's all in our heads and in narratives we communicate with one another. The symbols don't stick; the world moves on. People change; humans are animals that evolve over time, and continue to evolve. We can't even decide what a human is - the evergreen abortion debate - and other fictions like races, species and planets etc. shift as we change our mind. So when you want to get serious about causes, you're going to be using a system. You're going to be using symbols and relations between symbols; you're going to define your symbols in terms of commonalities between events and matter that appear to repeat reliably. But it only works because we have so little thinking matter, so little data, so little input; it's the only way we can squeeze the enormity of the world into our tiny heads.
- marknutter 10y ago
  I think this is a consequence of the fundamental problem with a materialist rationalist view of reality; namely, that when you consider reality to be only physical matter which can broken down into constituent matter and exists as a result of cause and effect, all meaning is stripped from the universe and you're forced to accept the first cause argument. The real problem comes down to what we mean by "truth". Truth can't simply be the accuracy of our models of the material world, because the material world can't tell us anything about how we should act.

by dorgo 10y ago

barrkel 10y ago

Different abstraction levels are normally different ways of talking about the same physical phenomena. That is, they are parallel; they don't stack. The most basic one is the one that doesn't exist in our heads and doesn't have a model with predictions to violate. What does "real" mean here? I'm using it as a proxy for truth, or perhaps better, accuracy in a model. That is, if a model of the world makes predictions about the world, the model is "real" to the degree that the predictions are correct. But all human models of the world have their limits, usually forced by our tiny little brains and meagre data input senses. We take something that we've decided to categorize, and create symbols to represent commonalities, and theorize relations between the symbols, and test these theories, and gradually refine a calculus of symbols that we can use to apply to the world, and the system works, in so far as the commonalities stay common, and the symbols aim squarely at the average of the referents. But it's not reality; it's all made up, like mathematics. It's just a story, it's all in our heads and in narratives we communicate with one another. The symbols don't stick; the world moves on. People change; humans are animals that evolve over time, and continue to evolve. We can't even decide what a human is - the evergreen abortion debate - and other fictions like races, species and planets etc. shift as we change our mind. So when you want to get serious about causes, you're going to be using a system. You're going to be using symbols and relations between symbols; you're going to define your symbols in terms of commonalities between events and matter that appear to repeat reliably. But it only works because we have so little thinking matter, so little data, so little input; it's the only way we can squeeze the enormity of the world into our tiny heads.

marknutter 10y ago
I think this is a consequence of the fundamental problem with a materialist rationalist view of reality; namely, that when you consider reality to be only physical matter which can broken down into constituent matter and exists as a result of cause and effect, all meaning is stripped from the universe and you're forced to accept the first cause argument. The real problem comes down to what we mean by "truth". Truth can't simply be the accuracy of our models of the material world, because the material world can't tell us anything about how we should act.