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Vladimir_Nesov comments on A Defense of Naive Metaethics - Less Wrong
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Logic can be used to talk about non-physical facts. Do you allow referring to logic even where the logic is talking about non-physical facts, or do you only allow referring to the logic that is talking about physical facts? Or maybe you taboo intended interpretation, however non-physical, but still allow the symbolic game itself to be morally relevant?
Alas, I think this is getting us into the problem of universals. :)
With you, too, Vladimir, I suspect our anticipations do not differ, but our language for talking about these subtle things is slightly different, and thus it takes a bit of work for us to understand each other.
By "logic referring to non-physical facts", do you have in mind something like "20+7=27"?
"3^^^^3 > 3^^^3", properties of higher cardinals, hyperreal numbers, facts about a GoL world, about universes with various oracles we don't have.
Things for which you can't build a trivial analogy out of physical objects, like a pile of 27 rocks (which are not themselves simple, but this is not easy to appreciate in the context of this comparison).
Certainly, one could reduce normative language into purely logical-mathematical facts, if that was how one was using normative language. But I haven't heard of people doing this. Have you? Would a reduction of 'ought' into purely mathematical statements ever connect up again to physics in a possible world? If so, could you give an example - even a silly one?
Since it's hard to convey tone through text, let me explicitly state that my tone is a genuinely curious and collaboratively truth-seeking one. I suspect you've done more and better thinking on metaethics than I have, so I'm trying to gain what contributions from you I can.
Why do you talk of "language" so much? Suppose we didn't have language (and there was only ever a single person), I don't think the problem changes.
Say, I would like to minimize ((X-2)*(X-2)+3)^^^3, where X is the number I'm going to observe on the screen. This is a pretty self-contained specification, and yet it refers to the world. The "logical" side of this can be regarded as a recipe, a symbolic representation of your goals. It also talks about a number that is too big to fit into the physical world.
Okay, sure. We agree about this, then.
This would require that we both have positions that accurately reflect reality, or are somehow synchronously deluded. This is a confusing territory, I know that I don't know enough to be anywhere confident in my position, and even that position is too vague to be worth systematically communicating, or to describe some important phenomena (I'm working on that). I appreciate the difficulty of communication, but I don't believe that we would magically meet at the end without having to change our ideas in nontrivial ways.
I just mean that our anticipations do not differ in a very local sense. As an example, imagine that we were using 'sound' in different ways like Albert and Barry. Surely Albert and Barry have different anticipations in many ways, but not with respect to the specific events closely related to the tree falling in a forest when nobody is around.