Rationality: From AI to Zombies

by Eliezer Yudkowsky

The map is multilevel, the territory is single-level. This doesn’t mean that the higher levels “don’t exist,” like looking in your garage for a dragon and finding nothing there, or like seeing a mirage in the desert and forming an expectation of drinkable water when there is nothing to drink. The higher levels of your map are not false, without referent; they have referents in the single level of physics. It’s not that the wings of an airplane unexist—then the airplane would drop out of the sky. The “wings of an airplane” exist explicitly in an engineer’s multilevel model of an airplane, and the wings of an airplane exist implicitly in the quantum physics of the real airplane. Implicit existence is not the same as nonexistence. The exact description of this implicitness is not known to us—is not explicitly represented in our map. But this does not prevent our map from working, or even prevent it from being true.

Against eliminativism