Vaniver comments on Decoherent Essences - Less Wrong

16 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 30 April 2008 06:32AM

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Comment author: Perplexed 23 January 2011 06:18:16PM 9 points [-]

so much of EY's philosophy appears to build directly on his interpretation of QM.

Is this really the case? It seems to me that that the interpretation of QM (and almost all micro-level details of fundamental physics) ought to be (and in Eliezer's case, are) independent of "macro-level" philosophy. Eliezer could justify his reductionism, his Bayesianism, his utilitarian ethics, his atheism, his opposition to most kinds of moral discounting, his intuitions regarding decision theory, his models of mind and of language, and his futurism - he could justify all these things even if he were a strict Newtonian believer in simple determinism who models all apparent indeterminacy as ignorance of the true initial conditions.

To my mind, the micro assumptions don't change the macro conclusions, they only change the way we talk about and justify them.

Comment author: Vaniver 23 January 2011 06:57:35PM 4 points [-]

To my mind, the micro assumptions don't change the macro conclusions, they only change the way we talk about and justify them.

I agree with you that one should reach most if not all of the same conclusions from a strict Newtonian perspective (or from a Copenhagenite perspective, and so on). But the way it's talked about does scare me, because it's difficult for me to tell why they believe the things they believe, and opaque reasoning rings several warning bells.

That is, to answer your original question- "Is this really the case?"- it certainly is the case that it appears that EY's philosophy builds directly on his interpretation of QM. When judging by appearances, we have to take the language into account, and to go deeper requires that you go down the rabbit hole to tell whether or not EY's philosophy actually requires those things- and that rabbit hole is one that is forbidding for non-mathematicians and oddly disquieting for physicists (at least, that's my impression as a physicist). QM is an inferential distance minefield.

It seems to me that MWI is just a convenient visualization trick, and thus there is equivalence, but I don't feel I understand EY's philosophy and its development well enough to argue for that interpretation.

Comment author: Perplexed 23 January 2011 07:09:25PM 0 points [-]

Agree. It would be nice to have Eliezer's take on this question.