I believe that purpose, meaning, chairness, and all those things exist in your head. I am not saying they aren't *real*, any more than computer programs aren't *real*. Just because they exist in your head doesn't mean they aren't important.
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Replying to @CurlOfGradient
But you haven't done that. You haven't started with things arising from the laws of physics and worked from there. You started with purpose and meaning and chairness and this drove you to look at physics, and you learned something *on top of* your existing knowledge and capacity
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Replying to @ReferentOfSelf @CurlOfGradient
You then turn around and try to replace all this knowledge and ability that allowed you in the first place to understand and do physics with that physics itself, and base all that understanding on top of the physics
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Replying to @CurlOfGradient
How so? You still deal with chairs as simply objectively existing without ever referencing the atoms. You aren't a reductionist in practice in 99% of your everyday dealings with the world
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Replying to @ReferentOfSelf
Because I don't need to be one 99% of the time. That doesn't mean we can't reduce things when we need to.
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Replying to @CurlOfGradient
Yes, and when we reduce it is in all but the most trivial cases partial, contextual, and contingent. Just because you can partially reduce things and this is frequently useful doesn't mean that all that there is is undifferentiated matter.
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Replying to @ReferentOfSelf
If we knew of phenomena that couldn't be explained in terms of the few basic laws of physics (or, since physics is currently incomplete, if we had reason to believe such phenom will eventually be discovered), I would shrug and agree. But so far, it looks like everything conforms.
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Replying to @CurlOfGradient @ReferentOfSelf
Just because we are too computationally limited to do the reduction in full does not mean we have reason to believe the reduction can't be done in principle. (Bracing for your inevitable "what do you mean by "in principle" reply)
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Replying to @CurlOfGradient
I'll try a different tract: In the meantime, we still need to deal with these things we can't "yet" reduce as things on their own terms, existing in their own right, becuase without the reduction we have no way of establishing their reality
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The objects doing a thing at this level is real, regardless of whether you know how it reduces to a lower level. My reductionism does not say "only the bottom level is real". It just says that higher levels supervene on lower levels. All levels are "real".
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