Eliezer Yudkowsky

I think that when physicists say there are no fundamental rainbows, the anti-reductionists here, there are no rainbows.

If you don't distinguish between the multi-level map and the mono-level territory, then when someone tries to explain to you that the rainbow is not a fundamental thing in physics, acceptance of this will feel like erasing rainbows from your multi-level map, which feels like erasing rainbows from the world.

When science says tigers are not elementary particles, they are made of quarks, the anti-reductionist hears this as the same sort of dismissal as we looked in your garage for a dragon, but there was just empty air.

What scientists did to rainbows and what scientists did to gnomes seemingly felt the same to Keats.

In support of this sub-thesis, I deliberately used several phrasings in my discussion of Keats' poem that were mind-projection fallacious.

If you didn't notice, this would seem to argue that such fallacies are customary enough to pass unremarked.

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

Actually, science emptied the model of air, of belief and haunts, and emptied the map of the mine of representations of gnomes.

Science did not actually, as Keats' poem itself would have it, take real angels' wings and destroy them with a cold touch of truth.

In reality, there never were any haunts in the air or gnomes in the mine.

Another example, what scientists did to rainbows and what scientists did to gnomes seemingly felt the same to Keats.

Scientists didn't do anything to gnomes, only to gnomes in quotes.

The quotation is not the referent.

It takes a strong mind, a deep honesty, and a deliberate effort to say, at this point, that which can be destroyed by the truth should be.

And the scientist hasn't taken the gnomes away, only taken my delusion away.

And I never held just title to my belief in gnomes in the first place.

I have not been deprived of anything I rightfully owned.

And if there are gnomes, I desire to believe there are gnomes.

If there are no gnomes, I desire to believe there are no gnomes.

Let me not become attached to beliefs I may not want, and all the other things that rationalists are supposed to say on such occasions.