I wonder if Max Tegmark would have written a similar comment. I'm not sure if there is a meaningful difference regarding Luke's question to say that there are only quantum amplitudes versus there are only relations.
What I'm saying is that in the physical world there are only causes and effects, and the primeness of a heap of pebbles is not an ontologically basic fact operating as a separate and additional element of physical reality, but it is nonetheless about as "intrinsic" to the heap of pebbles as anything.
Once morality stops being mysterious and you start cashing it out as a logical function, the moral awfulness of a murder is exactly as intrinsic as the primeness of a heap of pebbles. Just as we don't care whether pebble heaps are prime or experience...
In You Provably Can't Trust Yourself, Eliezer tried to figured out why his audience didn't understand his meta-ethics sequence even after they had followed him through philosophy of language and quantum physics. Meta-ethics is my specialty, and I can't figure out what Eliezer's meta-ethical position is. And at least at this point, professionals like Robin Hanson and Toby Ord couldn't figure it out, either.
Part of the problem is that because Eliezer has gotten little value from professional philosophy, he writes about morality in a highly idiosyncratic way, using terms that would require reading hundreds of posts to understand. I might understand Eliezer's meta-ethics better if he would just cough up his positions on standard meta-ethical debates like cognitivism, motivation, the sources of normativity, moral epistemology, and so on. Nick Beckstead recently told me he thinks Eliezer's meta-ethical views are similar to those of Michael Smith, but I'm not seeing it.
If you think you can help me (and others) understand Eliezer's meta-ethical theory, please leave a comment!
Update: This comment by Richard Chappell made sense of Eliezer's meta-ethics for me.