"When you say reality is fundamentally "good," doesn't that translate (in your terms) to just a tautology?" Sort of, but not quite.

"Aren't you just saying that the desires of sentient beings are fundamentally "the desires of sentient beings?"" No.

First of all, the word "tautology" is vague. I know it is a tautology to say that red is red. But is it a tautology to say that two is an even number? That's not clear. But if a tautology means that the subject and predicate mean the same thing, then saying that two is even is definitely not a tautology, because they don't mean the same thing. And in that way, "reality is fundamentally good" is not a tautology, because "reality" does not have the same meaning as "good."

Still, if you say that reality is fundamentally something, and you are right, there must be something similar to a tautology there. Because if there is nothing even like a tautology, you will be saying something false, as if you were to say that reality is fundamentally blue. That's not a tautology at all, but it's also false. But if what you say is true, then "being real" and "being that way" must be very deeply intertwined, and most likely even the meaning will be very close. Otherwise how would it turn out that reality is fundamentally that way?

I have remarked before that we get the idea of desire from certain feelings, but what makes us call it desire instead of a different feeling is not the subjective quality of the feeling, but the objective fact that when we feel that way, we tend to do a particular thing. E.g. when we are hungry, we tend to go and find food and eat it. So because we notice that we do that, we call that feeling a desire for food. Now this implies that the most important thing about the word "desire" is that it is a tendency to do something, not the fact that it is also a feeling.

So if we said, "everyone does what they desire to do," it would mean something like "everyone does what they tend to do." That is not a tautology, because you can occasionally do something that you do not generally tend to do, but it is very close to a tautology.

We get the idea of "good" from the fact that we are tending to do various things, and we assume that those various things must have something in common that explains why we are tending to do all of them. We call that common thing "good."

Now you could say, "the common thing is that you desire all of those things." But that is not the way the human mind is working here, whether it is right or wrong. We already know that we desire them all. We want to know "why" we desire them all. And we explain that by saying that they all have something that we call "goodness." We know it explains our desires, but that does not mean we know anything else about it.

This is really the exact point where I disagree with Eliezer. I think he believes that the common thing is the desire, and there is no other explanation except for random facts in the world that are responsible for our individual desires and for desires generally common in the human species. I think that the natural intuition that there is another explanation is correct. Now you might want to ask, "then what is good, apart from 'what explains our desires'"?

And I have already started to explain this in other comments, although I did not go into detail. I noted above that the most important thing about "desire" is that it is a tendency to do something. So likewise the most important thing about the word "good" is that it explains the tendency to do something. Now consider this fact about things: things tend to exist. And existing things tend to continue to exist. Why do they tend to do those things? In the first place, it is obvious why things tend to exist. Because they are real, and reality involves existence. And tending to continue to exist might be less obvious, but we can see that at least the particular reality of the thing is responsible for that tendency: why do rocks tend to continue to exist? Part of the reality of the rock (in this case its structure) is responsible for that tendency. It tends to continue to exist because of the reality it has.

In other words, the thing that explains why things tend to do things is reality itself. So reality is fundamentally good, that is, the explanation for why things tend to do the things they do is fundamentally their reality. Note that this last sentence is not a tautology, in that it has a distinct subject and predicate.

Richard Dawkins says that reality looks just as we would expect if it is fundamentally indifferent. And I am pretty sure Eliezer agrees with him about this. But in fact it does not look the way I would expect if it were fundamentally indifferent: I would expect in that situation that things would not have any tendencies at all, so all things would be random.

I will answer the things about my values in another comment.