You know the game of life, the cellular automaton?
You've got this grid and this world only has three rules it's very simple and each little cell goes on or off based on these rules about what's around them the interesting thing is that if you run this kind of system and you step back as a human observer you find all kinds of interesting patterns, you find large scale patterns. There are things called gliders that zip around and all this kind of stuff. It's amazing, if you actually run these very simple rules they give you all of this this very complex behaviour, so just think about this: you could be a reductionist about it and you could say: "Look I don't believe in gliders, there aren't any gliders. All there is are individual cells and there are only three rules and the cells are on and off that's it, I'm a micro reductionist, the whole thing is deterministic, these rules are totally deterministic, all that exists are these rules and these individual cells''. It's not that you're factually wrong because if you wanted to zoom in, you could zoom in and say: "Oh, it's just these little individual cells turning on and off according to these local rules''. But here's what you're missing if you don't believe in gliders - what you're never going to do is this thing that, for example, somebody did by using the gliders as signals, they built a Turing machine, a computer inside this world, you would never have built that if you didn't believe that these larger scale patterns exist, if you insist on focusing on the micro level view, you can explain things that somebody else has produced but you're not going to produce any new things. And so this, I think, is the problem with Laplace's demon, of course it's impossible for many reasons but let's just imagine that Laplace's demon was real and that he could actually predict where every particle was going to go, he could always tell you what a system that someone has prepared is going to do. So that's true and he could sort of track it forward but he would never make one because all microstates are equivalent to him, if you don't believe in these large-scale levels all the microstates are identical to you so no outcome is preferred to any other outcome. You cannot build anything, you cannot invent anything, you couldn't play a game of chess because every distribution of molecules to you is the same as any other distribution of molecules because you don't believe in chess pieces, none of those things exist to you so you couldn't do any of those things, you don't know what your next move in life or in chess or anything else is going to be because you don't believe in these higher levels, so to me what's really critical about all of this is that you can always choose the micro lens if you want but my question is where does that get you, what does it let you do that other lenses don't and what does it preclude you from that another lens would have helped you with.
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