Eliezer’s point (a quite justified one) is that the word “choice” is a name for something that human beings do, just as the name “apple” is a name for something human beings find in the world. Whatever you think an apple is, if you say it is only an illusion, then you’re not talking about apples, but something else. Likewise, whatever you might think a choice is, if you say it is only an illusion, you’re not talking about choices, but something else. For choice just means one of the things that people actually do in the real world, so it is quite real, not an illusion.
I think when people say that apples and choices are illusions, they might mean that they are patterns recognizable by people but not fundamental: if some system couldn’t recognize an apple (perhaps only because it never had any reason to form the concept) but did have a model of the amplitude distribution of the universe, it would get along just fine (actually it would probably just have different high-level concepts).
Eliezer’s point (a quite justified one) is that the word “choice” is a name for something that human beings do, just as the name “apple” is a name for something human beings find in the world. Whatever you think an apple is, if you say it is only an illusion, then you’re not talking about apples, but something else. Likewise, whatever you might think a choice is, if you say it is only an illusion, you’re not talking about choices, but something else. For choice just means one of the things that people actually do in the real world, so it is quite real, not an illusion.
I think when people say that apples and choices are illusions, they might mean that they are patterns recognizable by people but not fundamental: if some system couldn’t recognize an apple (perhaps only because it never had any reason to form the concept) but did have a model of the amplitude distribution of the universe, it would get along just fine (actually it would probably just have different high-level concepts).