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Eugine_Nier comments on Beware Selective Nihilism - Less Wrong Discussion
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This topic probably deserves more thought than I've put into it, but it seems to me that you can tell what things are ontologically primitive in in reality by looking at what objects the fundamental laws of physics keep track of and directly operate upon. For example in Newtonian physics these would be individual particles, and in Quantum Mechanics it would just be the wavefunction. (Of course at this point we don't know what the fundamental laws of physics actually are so we can't say what things are ontologically primitive yet, but it seems pretty clear that it can't be human beings.)
Ontological primitiveness seems like a binary property. Either something is kept track of and operated upon directly by the fundamental laws of physics, or it isn't. I can't see what sense it would make to say one thing is "more primitive" than another.
(It may be that there is more than one concept of "ontological primitiveness" that is useful. I think my definition/explanation makes sense in combination with my recent posts and comments, but you may have another one in mind?)
The problem is that different equivalent formulations will make different things ontologically primitive.
How do you know there is a fundamental level, as opposed something like a void cathedral?
Perhaps in this case we could say "the ontology of the universe is one or the other but I can't tell which, so I'll just have to be uncertain". Do you see any problems with this, or have any better ideas?
Can you give an example of a mathematical formulation of a void cathedral, just to show that such a thing is possible?
One description is something like the following: take the space of computable universes that agree with our observations so far. Rather than putting an Occam prior over it, put an ultrafilter on it. One can pick the ultrafilter so that the set of universes where any particular level is fundamental has measure zero.
I'm afraid I lack the background knowledge and/or math skills to figure out your idea from this short description. I can't find any papers after doing a search either, so I guess this is your original idea? If so, why not write it up somewhere?