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TheOtherDave comments on What makes us think _any_ of our terminal values aren't based on a misunderstanding of reality? - Less Wrong
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Funny you should say that. I, for one, have the terminal value of continued personal existence (a.k.a. being alive). On LW I'm learning that continuity, personhood, and existence might well be illusions. If that is the case, my efforts to find ways to survive amount to extending something that isn't there in the first place
Of course there's the high probability that we're doing the philosophical equivalent of dividing by zero somewhere among our many nested extrapolations.
But let's say consciousness really is an illusion. Maybe the take-home lesson is that our goals all live at a much more superficial level than we are capable of probing. Not that reductionism "robs" us of our values or anything like that... but it may mean that cannot exist an instrumentally rational course of action that is also perfectly epistemically rational. That being less wrong past some threshold will not help us set better goals for ourselves, only get better at pursuing goals we pre-committed to pursuing.
Can you say more about how you get from "X is an illusion" to "X isn't there in the first place"?
To clarify that question a little... suppose I'm thirsty in the desert, and am pursuing an image of water, and I eventually conclude to my disappointment that it is just a mirage.
I'm doing two things here:
* I'm correcting an earlier false belief about the world -- my observation is not of water, but of a particular kind of light-distorting system of heated air.
* I'm making an implicit value judgment: I want water, I don't want a mirage, which is why I'm disappointed. The world is worse than I thought it was.
Those are importantly different. If I were, instead, a non-thirsty student of optics, I would still correct my belief but I might not make the same value judgment: I might be delighted to discover that what I'd previously thought was a mere oasis is instead an interesting mirage!
In the same spirit, suppose I discover that continuity, personhood, and existence are illusions, when I had previously thought they were something else (what that "something else" is, I don't really know). So, OK, I correct my earlier false belief about the world.
There's still a value judgment left to make though... am I disappointed to realize I'm pursuing a mere illusion rather than the "something else" I actually wanted? Or am I delighted to discover that I'm pursuing a genuine illusion rather than an ill-defined "something else"?
Your way of speaking seems to take the former for granted. Why is that?
Well, it will, and it won't. But in the sense I think you mean it, yes, that's right... it won't.
Our values are what they are. Being less wrong improves our ability to implement those values, and our ability to articulate those values, which may in turn cause the values we're aware of and pursuing to become more consistent, but it doesn't somehow replace our values with superior values.