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orthonormal comments on The conscious tape - Less Wrong
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It continually amazes me that people think "physical existence" is somehow less mysterious and more fundamental than the existence of a mathematical object!
Er, no, it's not less mysterious -- we understand mathematical objects better than we understand physical existence; mathematical objects can be treated with, well, math, and physical existence gets dealt with by jokes like philosophy.
I'm not sure what you mean by more fundamental, but physical existence does seem to be roughly as important as mathematical objects...at any rate, it matters a lot to me whether things exist in fact or merely in theory.
We've been given special evidence in our own case, but if we step away from that for a moment, what I mean should be clear. Let's take a hypothetical Universe X, which is very different from ours.
Saying "Universe X is a simple mathematical object" is pretty well comprehensible.
Saying "Universe X exists in some special way, distinct from just being a mathematical object, and in fact it might not be describable as a simple mathematical object" is just plain mysterious. It's up for debate whether it's even a meaningful statement.
Apply that to discussion of our own universe.
But, but, you don't understand. Math isn't reeeeeeeaaaaaaaaaaaaaal!
I have an idea. Maybe it'd be more convincing if you said "Universe X is a simple computation." People feel like computations are more real, and who knows, maybe they're right. Maybe reality is computation, just a subset of mathematics. It seems a lot easier for people to envision that, at any rate. Or take Eliezer who (I think?) seems to think (or at least seemed to think) that reality juice is magically related to acyclic causal graphs.
You'll still probably get the same objections, though: "Computations aren't reeeeeeeaaaaaaaal, they have to be computed on something! Where's the something coming from?" But that seems a little bit more silly, because the Something that is computing can be infinitely far back in the chain of computation. All of a sudden it feels more arbitrary to be postulating a Something that is Real. And real metaphysicists know that things shouldn't feel arbitrary.
Now you're just ripping off the last chapter of Drescher's Good and Real. You know he comments here sometimes - he'd be so hurt at such plagiarism. :)
I am? I only read the decision theory chapters of Good and Real, the day before he showed up at SIAI house for the decision theory workshop. I'll definitely read the last chapter when I get back to California.