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Vladimir_Nesov comments on A Rationalist's Tale - Less Wrong
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I'd rather say that the so-called "instantiated" objects are no different from the abstract ones, that in reality, there is no fundamental property of being real, there is only a natural category humans use to designate the stuff of normal physics, a definition that can be useful in some cases, but not always.
So there are easy ways to explain this idea at least, right? Humans' decisions are affected by "counterfactual" futures all the time when planning, and so the counterfactuals have influence, and it's hard for us to get a notion of existence outside of such influence besides a general naive physicalist one. I guess the not-easy-to-explain parts are about decision theoretic zombies where things seem like they 'physically exist' as much as anything else despite exerting less influence, because that clashes more with our naive physicalist intuitions? Not to say that these bizarre philosophical ideas aren't confused (e.g. maybe because influence is spread around in a more egalitarian way than it naively feels like), but they don't seem to be confusing as such.
Human decisions are affected by thoughts about counterfactuals. So the question is, what is the nature of the influence that the "content" or "object" of a thought, has on the thought?
I do not believe that when human beings try to think about possible worlds, that these possible worlds have any causal effect in any way on the course of the thinking. The thinking and the causes of the thinking are strictly internal to the "world" in which the thinking occurs. The thinking mind instead engages in an entirely speculative and inferential attempt to guess or feel out the structure of possibillity - but this feeling out does not in any way involve causal contact with other worlds or divergent futures. It is all about an interplay between internally generated partial representations, and a sense of what is possible, impossible, logically necessary, etc in an imagined scenario; but the "sensory input" to these judgments consists of the imagining of possibilities, not the possibilities themselves.
Sure, thats a fine way to put it. But, how do you even begin estimating how likely that is?
How likely what is? There doesn't appear to be a factual distinction, just what I find to be a more natural way of looking at things, for multiple purposes.
You don't think whether or not the Tegmark Level 4 multiverse exists could ever have any decision theoretic import?
I believe that "exists" doesn't mean anything fundamentally significant (in senses other than referring to presence of a property of some fact; or referring to the physical world; or its technical meanings in logic), so I don't understand what it would mean for various (abstract) things to exist to greater or lower extent.
Okay. What is your probability for that belief? (Not that I expect a number, but surely you can't be certain.)
That would require understanding alternatives, which I currently don't. The belief in question is mostly asserting confusion, and as such it isn't much use, other than as a starting point that doesn't purport to explain what I don't understand.
Anyone who has positive accounts of existentness to put forth, I'd like to hear them. (E.g., Eliezer has talked about this related existentness-like-thing that has do with being in a causal graph (being computed), but I'm not sure if that's just physicalist intuition admitting much confusion or if it's supposed to be serious theoretical speculation caused by interesting underlying motivations that weren't made explicit.)
Fine. So you agree that we should be wary of any hypotheses of which the reality of abstract objects is a part?
No, I won't see that in itself as a reason to be wary, since as I said repeatedly I don't know how to parse the property of something being real in this sense.
Personally, I am always wary of hypotheses I don't know how to parse.