The amazing thing is that this is a scientifically productive rule—finding a new representation that gets rid of epiphenomenal distinctions, often means a substantially different theory of physics with experimental consequences!
This "Anti-Epiphenomenal Physics" is well known by a less fancy name of symmetry. Looking for hidden symmetries (and applying the Noether theorem to them, whenever possible) is the basic tool theorists use all the time. If anything, they go farther than that by reconstructing broken symmetries or even designing theories with hard-to-imagine symmetries.
Today's post, Mach's Principle: Anti-Epiphenomenal Physics was originally published on 24 May 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):
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This post is part of the Rerunning the Sequences series, where we'll be going through Eliezer Yudkowsky's old posts in order so that people who are interested can (re-)read and discuss them. The previous post was My Childhood Role Model, and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.
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