David_Gerard 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: David_Gerard 25 January 2011 11:36:19AM *  0 points [-]

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

Is this really the case?

I got this from Quantum Explanations:

I think I must now temporarily digress from the sequence on zombies (which was a digression from the discussion of reductionism, which was a digression from the Mind Projection Fallacy) in order to discuss quantum mechanics. The reasons why this belongs in the middle of a discussion on zombies in the middle of a discussion of reductionism in the middle of a discussion of the Mind Projection Fallacy, will become apparent eventually.

That is, Eliezer brought QM up at all as part of a philosophical discussion, because he felt he had to in order to make his philosophical points. You may then argue (as you seem to in your comment) that he did not in fact have to bring in QM to make his points, but he felt he had to, per that quote.

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