When I ask myself "what is rationality?" I think the computation I'm doing in my head is also about something external to me
Well, if you're asking about human rationality, then the prudent-way-to-think involves lots of empirical info about the actual flaws in human cognition, and so on. If you're asking about rationality in the sense of probability theory, then the only reference to the actual that I can discern is about anthropics and possibly prudent priors - things like the Dutch Book Argument are math, which we find compelling because of our values.
If you think that we're referring to something else - what is it, where is it stored? Is there a stone tablet somewhere on which these things are written, on which I can scrawl graffiti to alter the very fabric of rationality? Probably not - so where are the facts that the discourse is about, in your view?
I think "what is rationality" (and by that I mean ideal rationality) is like "does P=NP". There is some fact of the matter about it that is independent of what premises we choose to, or happen to, accept. I wish I knew where these facts live, or exactly how it is that we have any ability to determine them, but I don't. Fortunately, I don't think that really weakens my argument much.
On Wei_Dai's complexity of values post, Toby Ord writes:
The kind of moral realist positions that apply Occam's razor to moral beliefs are a lot more extreme than most philosophers in the cited survey would sign up to, methinks. One such position that I used to have some degree of belief in is:
Strong Moral Realism: All (or perhaps just almost all) beings, human, alien or AI, when given sufficient computing power and the ability to learn science and get an accurate map-territory morphism, will agree on what physical state the universe ought to be transformed into, and therefore they will assist you in transforming it into this state.
But most modern philosophers who call themselves "realists" don't mean anything nearly this strong. They mean that that there are moral "facts", for varying definitions of "fact" that typically fade away into meaninglessness on closer examination, and actually make the same empirical predictions as antirealism.
Suppose you take up Eliezer's "realist" position. Arrangements of spacetime, matter and energy can be "good" in the sense that Eliezer has a "long-list" style definition of goodness up his sleeve, one that decides even contested object-level moral questions like whether abortion should be allowed or not, and then tests any arrangement of spacetime, matter and energy and notes to what extent it fits the criteria in Eliezer's long list, and then decrees goodness or not (possibly with a scalar rather than binary value).
This kind of "moral realism" behaves, to all extents and purposes, like antirealism.
I might compare the situation to Eliezer's blegg post: it may be that moral philosophers have a mental category for "fact" that seems to be allowed to have a value even once all of the empirically grounded surrounding concepts have been fixed. These might be concepts such as "would aliens also think this thing?", "Can it be discovered by an independent agent who hasn't communicated with you?", "Do we apply Occam's razor?", etc.
Moral beliefs might work better when they have a Grand Badge Of Authority attached to them. Once all the empirically falsifiable candidates for the Grand Badge Of Authority have been falsified, the only one left is the ungrounded category marker itself, and some people like to stick this on their object level morals and call themselves "realists".
Personally, I prefer to call a spade a spade, but I don't want to get into an argument about the value of an ungrounded category marker. Suffice it to say that for any practical matter, the only parts of the map we should argue about are parts that map-onto a part of the territory.