I have a degree in chemistry. I don't need to follow the links to know that you are overstating the case. Shit, I've *made* water from its elements. And you're saying that I don't understand it *at all*?
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Replying to @Jayarava
I didn’t say “at all.” Many chemical properties and reactions can be (and routinely are) predicted from approximations, idealizations, and rules of thumb. (These are not, in general reductions.) Some also can be predicted from reductive calculations. Some cannot.
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Replying to @Meaningness @Jayarava
I am not a chemist. OTOH I have worked professionally in molecular modeling, and have multiple publications and patents in the field, so I’m not completely ignorant. My knowledge is quite out of date, so I’ve been interested to learn a bit about the state of art for water models.
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Replying to @Meaningness
Because you don't use "accurately" accurately, you collapse all the relevant distinctions. We can model water on many different levels to differing degrees of accuracy.
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Replying to @Jayarava @Meaningness
It is quite true that at the quantum level our models are less accurate and certainly less precise. But that does not equate to what you initially said "We can’t accurately simulate the physical behavior even of pure water."
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Replying to @Jayarava @Meaningness
We can and do accurately simulate the behaviour of pure water on many levels. As any hydrologist or hydro-dynamics or fluid engineer or *chemist* would tell you. Simulations *are* heuristics - since they don't involve actual molecules.
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Replying to @Jayarava @Meaningness
So your argument about reductionism based on this hyperbole is simply false. There are better arguments against such reductive arguments, you don't involve this kind of weak proposition.
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Replying to @Jayarava @Meaningness
Are you doing philosophy or science? Just because we cannot simulate a brain (science) does not mean that we should be looking anywhere else for mental phenomena (philosophy). The philosophy is solid, even if the science isn't.
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Replying to @Jayarava
Oh! I’m sorry, now I think I see how we were miscommunicating. I’m absolutely not advocating mind/body dualism or anything similar. My point about brain simulation was directed instead against AI and Singularitarian fantasies. Science, not philosophy of mind at all.
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Replying to @Meaningness
You tweeted: "Water is a knock-down argument against reductionism as a theory of how rationality works." This clearly *is* philosophy of mind. And "accurately" is still a scale, not an absolute. But certainly, reductionism alone cannot achieve what we need to achieve.
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Ah, I think I see how what I wrote was unclear. I take rationality to be a smallish part of mental activity (and not just mental either). What I was countering was the idea that rationality works by performing a reduction of eg water behavior to QM.
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Replying to @Meaningness @Jayarava
This is completely orthogonal to whether mental processes can in principle themselves be reduced to QM.
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