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I think you've hit this squarely, probably because I read it as confirming my bias *against* monism and for pluralism. A while back, I tried to call out the difference between abstraction and unification. Abstraction ignores particularities (even if carefully), whereas unification facilitates the reconstruction of those particularities. I think David Deutsch says this well with his "hard to vary" conception of explanatory power. We're all sympathetic with reduction when and where it works. If we can make the reduction into a smaller/shorter expression without truncating its expressive power, then it's universally a good thing. And that's not to say that particulars-ignoring abstraction isn't also (often) a good thing. But it's not universally a good thing.

I really wish more people would/could permanently install a "methodological" qualifier in front of every -ism they advocate. So, if you call yourself a monist, are you a methodological monist? And if not, if you're ideal-monist but methodological-pluralist, then I don't particularly care about your idealism. I care about your methods more than your thoughts. At least then, when someone foists a reduction on us, we can, in practice, find if/where they've ignored or assumed away some particulars.

With the above context, I confirm "out loud" that I don't believe in this position that EricC and Nick seem to hold. I firmly believe in an opaque inner world. But it's an ideal belief, not a practical one. That's the only reason I find it interesting to try to formulate their position in my own words.


ps Sorry if my aggressive clipping clipped too much. But I rely on everyone being able to use a threaded mail client or browse nabble for more context.

On 5/18/20 9:26 PM, David Eric Smith wrote:
> Keyword is Reductionism.  The narrative went something like this (HEP = High Energy Physicist; ROS = anyone from the Rest of Science)
> [...]
> My own expectation is that the kinds of primitives that people are after will have a certain character of irreducibility about them, and that is what makes them both interesting and hard to drag out into clarity.  And be careful: when I say “irreducibility” I use the word advisedly, and by analogies to cases where it does very good work.  In group theory, we are very interested in distinctions between irreducible and reducible representations.  Tononi’s construction — whatever its other virtues or defects — is essentially a measure of the irreducibility in some information-transmission measure.  Even prime numbers have a specific kind of irreducibility that makes their status not decidable with less than exhaustive search.  The image I want to take from those examples is the same kind of “irreducibility” of patterns that the ROS character above was referring to when he said there are aspects of the patterns that come out at higher order that require their own system, which is


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