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Hand vs. Fingers — LessWrong

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Back to our original topic: Reductionism, which (in case you've forgotten) is part of a sequence on the Mind Projection Fallacy. There can be emotional problems in accepting reductionism, if you think that things have to be fundamental to be fun. But this position commits us to never taking joy in anything more complicated than a quark, and so I prefer to reject it. To review, the reductionist thesis is that we use multi-level models for computational reasons, but physical reality has only a single level. If this doesn't sound familiar, please reread "Reductionism". Today I'd like to pose the following conundrum: When you pick up a cup of water, is it your hand that picks it up? Most people, of course, go with the naive popular answer: "Yes." Recently, however, scientists have made a stunning discovery: It's not your hand that holds the cup, it's actually your fingers, thumb, and palm. Yes, I know! I was shocked too. But it seems that after scientists measured the forces exert

x Hand vs. Fingers — LessWrong Physicalism 201 Reductionism Rationality Personal Blog 88 Hand vs. Fingers by Eliezer Yudkowsky 30th Mar 2008 4 min read 94 88 Back to our original topic: Reductionism , which (in case you've forgotten) is part of a sequence on the Mind Projection Fallacy . There can be emotional problems in accepting reductionism, if you think that things have to be fundamental to be fun. But this position commits us to never taking joy in anything more complicated than a quark, and so I prefer to reject it. To review, the reductionist thesis is that we use multi-level models fo

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