Eliezer Yudkowsky

The air has been emptied of its haunts and the mind de-gnomed, but the rainbow is still there.

In writing a wrong question, I wrote, tracing back the chain of causality step by step, I discover that my belief that I'm wearing socks is fully explained by the fact that I'm wearing socks.

On the other hand, if I see a mirage of a lake in the desert, the correct causal explanation of my vision does not involve the fact of any actual lake in the desert.

In this case, my belief in the lake is not just explained, but explained away.

The rainbow was explained.

The haunts in the air and gnomes in the mine were explained away.

I think this is the key distinction that anti-reductionists don't get about reductionism.

You can see this failure to get the distinction in the classic objection to reductionism.

If reductionism is correct,

then even your belief in reductionism is just the mere result of the motion of molecules.

Why should I listen to anything you say?

The key word in the above is mere, a word which implies that accepting reductionism would explain away all the reasoning processes leading up to my acceptance of reductionism the way that an optical illusion is explained away.

But you can explain how a cognitive process works without it being mere.

My belief that I'm wearing socks is a mere result of my visual cortex reconstructing nerve impulses sent from my retina, which received photons reflected off my socks.

Which is to say, according to scientific reductionism,

My belief that I'm wearing socks is a mere result of the fact that I'm wearing socks.

What could be going on in the anti-reductionists' minds such that they would put rainbows and belief in reductionism in the same category as haunts and gnomes?

Several things are going on simultaneously.

But for now, let's focus on the basic idea introduced yesterday—

the mind projection fallacy between a multi-level map and a mono-level territory.