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Will_Newsome comments on Beware Selective Nihilism - Less Wrong Discussion
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Comments (46)
Doesn't this depend on how your utility function defines "people"? If it's defined via pattern continuity, you get one answer to this question, and if it's defined via physical continuity (or perhaps a combination of physical and pattern continuity), you get another. (Much like how the "a tree falls in forest" question depends on how "sound" is defined.)
Note that if "people" were ontologically primitive, then there would be a single objective answer. People are not ontologically primitive in reality, but are in our usual models. So it seems reasonable that we might intuitively think there should be a single objective answer to "what will someone see when they step into a Star Trek transporter" when there really isn't.
If you don't mind a rather primitive question:
If I were to ask you 'which things are ontologically primitive in reality?', what kinds of things would you use to justify your answer? To be clear, I'm not just asking about what your answer is, but what kind of evidence you think is relevant to determining an answer. What, in other words, would things have to look like for you to conclude that human beings were ontologically primitive in reality (and not just in our usual models).
I ask, among other reasons, because although I'm confident that phenomena relevant to human beings, like behaviors, thoughts, biological processes, etc. are reducible to more fundamental physical systems, it's not obvious to me that this straightforwardly means that those more fundamental physical systems are more ontologically primitive than human beings. So far as I understand things, the physical, chemical, and biological theories we use to explain phenomena relevant to human beings don't purport to make claims about ontological primitiveness.
Sorta related. (Someone write "Metametametaphysics" plz.)