= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
VKS comments on Rationality Quotes April 2012 - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (858)
(LessWrong implicitly assumes certain metaphysics pretty often, e.g. when they talk about "simulation", "measure", "reality fluid", and so on; it seems to me that "anthropics" is a place where experience meets metaphysics. My preferred metaphysic for anthropics comes from decision theory, and my intuitions about decision theory come to a small extent from theological metaphysics and to a larger extent from theoretical computer science, e.g. algorithmic probability theory, which I figured is a metaphysic for the same reason that monadology is a metaphysic. ISTM that even if metaphysics aren't as fundamental as they pretend to be, they're still useful and perhaps necessary for organizing our experiences and intuitions so as to predict/understand prospective/counterfactual experiences in highly unusual circumstances (e.g. simulations).)
What?
When someone on Lesswrong uses the term 'simulation', they are probably making some implicit metaphysical claims about what it means for some object(A) to be a simulation of some other object(B). (This particular subject often falls under the part of metaphysics known as ontology.)
The same applies to usage of most terms.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but "They are probably making some implicit metaphysical claims about what it means for some object(A) to be a simulation of some other object(B)." and "They are probably making some implicit claims about what it means for some object(A) to be a simulation of some other object(B)" mean exactly the same thing.
They do happen to mean the same thing. This is because the question "What does it mean for some y to be an x?" is a metaphysical question.
"They are probably making some aesthetic claim about why object(A) is more beautiful than object(B)" and "They are probably making some claim about why object(A) is more beautiful than object(B)" also mean the same thing.
Come to that, they both probably mean the same thing as "They are probably making some implicit claims about how some object(B) differs from some other object (A) it simulates," which eliminates the reference to meaning as well.