shminux comments on Math is Subjunctively Objective - Less Wrong

14 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 25 July 2008 11:06AM

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Comment author: [deleted] 12 September 2012 03:55:59AM 2 points [-]

I think I see where you are coming from with that now.

It seems to me that the territory assumption is necessary for morality, and not much else (because we want to care about things that "exist", but otherwise probability theory is defined over possible observations only).

Of course a great number of unnecessary things have been called "necessary for morality"...

I'm going to read your comments a bit more and see if I can settle my mind on this instrumentalism thing. Do you reccommend anything I should check out?

Comment author: shminux 12 September 2012 06:25:54AM 0 points [-]

the territory assumption is necessary for morality

I don't see how. Feel free to explicate.

Do you reccommend anything I should check out?

Sorry. I wish I could say "Popper", since he basically , but he argued against Bohr's instrumentalism on some grounds I don't fully understand. quote from Wikipedia:

my reply to instrumentalism consists in showing that there are profound differences between "pure" theories and technological computation rules, and that instrumentalism can give a perfect description of these rules but is quite unable to account for the difference between them and the theories.

Usually when I read a critique of instrumentalism, it is straw-manned first (I think of it as InSTRAWmentalism). I am quite well aware that this could be a problem with my, admittedly patchy, understanding of the issue, and am happy to change my mind when a good argument comes along.

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