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chaosmosis comments on The Fabric of Real Things - Less Wrong
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You have observed that objects tend conserve energy. You have also observed that the cosmological horizon isn't absolute, but is in fact centered on you. You have also observed that time is symmetric (charge and parity flipped). You have observed that a model of the universe without any absolute coordinates is more likely. Thus we induce that were you put on a spaceship, you would never cross the cosmological horizon, from your own point of view. Similarly it is very likely that some other person would have the same experiences.
Q. E. D(?)
Objects inside the cosmological horizon are the ones I observe tend to conserve energy.
I think you said this backwards, or else I don't know what you mean by saying the horizon is centered on me.
I don't know what you mean by this.
Your terminology is unfamiliar to me.
I'm uncertain how we induce this from the previous statements.
I can't agree to this statement until I understand the ones previous to it.
My overall impression of your arguments is that you made the same argument over again, just using more complicated terminology and breaking it down into smaller parts. I think my initial line of argument stands against this sort of attack. Everything that I know is derived from my experiences. By definition I cannot have had experiences or been effected by things outside the cosmological horizon. Therefore I cannot know anything about what happens outside the cosmological horizon.
Things don't exist in any meaningful sense except a relational one. Yudkowsky's arguments here seem reminiscent of certain Kantian concepts or of Plato's idea of eternal forms, and those sort of arguments have always annoyed me. It's useless to make predictions or judgements about things that you will never encounter in any way. I don't understand why it's so important to Yudkowsky to insist that we can know things about the universe external to ourselves. Even if we could, so what? Why would I even care?
Yes, exactly.
The cosmological horizon is defined in terms of a distance from a given observer. It is the distance beyond which you cannot observe anything, due to the expansion of the universe.
If you run the universe backwards, flipping all charges (positive to negative and vice versa) and parity (like a mirror image of the universe, I think) then the laws of physics, as we know them, remain unchanged at the atomic level. (Don't ask about all those eggs suddenly unscrambling in this reversed universe).
This is one of the foundational assumptions of relativity - that there is no absolute rest frame. That a set of coordinates using any one non-accelerating object as the origin is just as useful as the set of coordinates using any other non-accelerating object as the origin; you can use the same equations to describe the universe, regardless of the velocity of the origin. (Note that the acceleration of the origin still has an effect). For argument in support of this point, I recommend "On The Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies" by A. Einstein (it's more readable than most people think).
Quite. I hope this helps.
My confusion was a result of me not recognizing that the Cosmological Horizon would be different if two people existed in different locations. It was also a result of taking a post-warp perspective instead of one which would apply equally well both post and pre warp, which caused me to misunderstand the way that some of those arguments were meant to function.
I don't think the point about absolute coordinates was relevant, or else I still might be misunderstanding it. The position I'm trying to defend doesn't say that "nothing exists outside of me", it takes a more agnostic approach and says that I shouldn't bother trying to decide whether things exist outside of me or whether or not I'm justified in assuming that everything there is the same as here. I don't say that the universe actually has a giant sphere built into it, centered on me; I just contend that I don't know anything about things that I'll never interact with and that I'm not much interested in them.
Thank you very much, you definitely helped.
The Cosmological Horizon was named well. It's a horizon. Walk a couple of hundred miles and look again and the horizon is still going to be just as far away as you started. (This is without even considering living on a planet that is expanding at an accelerating rate.)
You don't have to care about most of physics. Get an intuitive grasp on Newtonian physics, take it on faith that the guys who made your GPS know something about something called "Relativity" and you are set. Oh, and if folks invent space travel sufficiently powerful that horizon issues come into it don't start acting as folks who are going to be far away are going to die just because at some time in the future it will be theoretically impossible to contact them. That could get awkward and make straightjackets necessary.
This argument begs the question by assuming that it is morally wrong to not value the lives of people who are functionally abstractions, which is the assumption that I am questioning. Because of vagueness, I'm unsure whether or not this would be accurate, but I also get the feeling that you might be conflating convenient societal conventions with actual individual moralities.
No it doesn't. It expresses a position. One that is a necessary exception to the "well I suppose you don't need to understand or care about physics if you really don't want to" concession I had made in the preceding statements. It does convey the message that you disagree with---that physics doesn't care about your disbelief, your sister in a long long time and a galaxy far away is an artifact of the same physics that your are made of and thereby it rejects "Why should I even care?" as an anomaly rather than a default.
For the purpose of the discussion your actual morality is barely relevant and a "prefer my sister to be alive assuming she actual was real according to the physics we operate on" morality is assumed merely for the sake of convenience. If you really want you can outright hate your counterfactual sister, in which case not murdering her could be the mistake you make. Or, you could conceivably construct a utility function that values configurations of the universe only when they happen to be spatially located sufficiently near to the future-object you call "you". That allows you to "just not care" about such things.
I infer, by the way, that you don't value anything in the universe after the time of your death. Some people (claim that they) have such a value system. For you it is implied because "outside your future light cone" isn't defined if you don't exist. As an illustration consider your brother flying at near light speed in the opposite direction to your sister. You can choose, if you follow your brother in your relativistic rocket you can keep him within your future light cone but lose your sister. If you follow your sister then you lose your brother. If you are dead then your utility function doesn't specify which sibling you followed and sophistmagically allowed to remain 'real'.
I suppose you could propose a hack to your utility function such that when you die the "stuff that matters and is considered real" part of reality could become fixed to "stuff that is within the light cone of you at the time of your death". But then that would imply that your sister and brother are both 'real' but that they aren't 'real' to each other.
Not remotely. Merely assuming one of the must uncontroversial of societal conventions (and human instinct) out of (perceived) convenience. Again, your morality, ethics and values can be as arbitrary as you like for the purpose of this conversation.
I understand that morality and physics are different, but I think you might underestimate the connection. My personal epistemology says that in order to avoid an infinite regress we need to place some sort of foundation on our concept of what is true or not. I use my internal values as this foundation, and only consider a concept to be true or meaningful if that concept achieves my values, whether directly or indirectly. I don't think this is as unreasonable as you like to portray it.
Concepts which do not pay rent do not exist for me; I don't bother wasting my time or cognitive space pondering their existence or nonexistence. Believing in the existence of physics outside the Cosmological Horizon doesn't do anything useful for me, because it doesn't lead me to make any new predictions about what my experiences will be. The only reason it would possibly matter to me is if I valued peoples' existence as an abstract thought rather than as a tangible interaction. Even then, I don't think it would deserve the status of a truth, it would be more of a convenient fiction that it makes me feel happy to believe in.
When you talked about future societies that have to deal with problems related to the horizon, and said that those societies would need to have a rule saying they should believe in the existence of people beyond their horizon, that is what I felt was conflating convenient societal convention and individual morality.
You keep saying that. I still reject the premise. This is not a correct usage of the local jargon "pay rent". Use a different phrase.
What predictions are you lead to by these concepts?
If the terminology is unfamiliar I suggest reading some physics textbooks about relativity.
What I inretrospect seem to be trying to communicate is that of the solomonoffian anti-solipsist: It is a much simpler hypothesis that you are in fact not the center of the universe in any meaningful sense. The so-called cosmological horison is a strictly observer centric phenomenon in general relativity.
My hypothesis is a mathematical construction that doesn't mention the cosmological horison directly, but has it as a deduced property of the universe; to my best abilities it seems your's have it as a basic truth.