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lessdazed comments on Open thread, October 2011 - Less Wrong
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How is this defined? If an airplane has a clear floor such that its passengers vomit whenever they look down, removing the floor would put them in an even worse position. We want to remove only the property of transparency, which would involve replacing the clear material with an entirely different opaque material that had all other properties identical.
What's troubling to me about the counterfactual is that it doesn't seem to have an objective baseline, a single thing that is ~X, so we are left comparing Y(X) with Y(Z), the utility of thing X instead of thing Z. I'm not sure how valid it is to talk about simply removing properties because the set of higher level properties depends on the arrangement of atoms. It seems like properties are their own thing that can be individually mixed and matched separate from material but they really can't be.
If we're using 'the object in question doesn't exist' as the baseline for comparison, I'd say that the clear floor actually has positive utility. That's just counter-intuitive because we have such a strong tendency to think of the case that's currently normal as the baseline, rather than the 'doesn't exist' case.
I do agree that neither of those baselines is objectively correct in any sense (though the 'doesn't exist' one seems a bit more coherent and stable if we find a need to choose one), and that remembering that properties don't have independent existence is generally useful when considering possible cases.