“What the physical world actually looks like” seems likely to be a matter of preferences… probably I’d go with one of “avoid thinking about it“ or “move away from ascribing metaphysical significance to existing,” or at least moving towards a state of ignorance.
That doesn’t seem true as stated. It doesn’t seem likely that reality can actually be several different things simultaneously, when viewed by people with different preferences, or that it can seem different according to preferences.
It does seem that ontology is underdetermined by empiricism, IE different people with the same set of observations will come to different beliefs...and that might well have something to do with different values.
If one doesn’t care about other universes ,or futures where one is not alive, one could treat them as nonexistent for decision making purposes, which is a more reasonable , but less literal interpretation of Christiano’s claim. But that’s not a serious ontological claim, and doesnt require a change in the meaning of “to exist”.
These nuances are important, because there is a lot of bad philosophy out there, and a lot of it originates from un-nuanced takes such as “we don’t know reality” and “it’s all perception”.
It’s possible and common to value reality per se, and that makes that kind of DT much more complex than one that values observations or dollar rewards.
Being okay with blurring the epistemic/ontic distinction. I’m obviously using a somewhat deflationary, pragmatic notion of existence. If we always act to affect these universes, no matter what,
It’s not no-matter-what, because these other universes don’t necessarily exist.
And also , you dont get the ability to act on them free with their existence. There’s no cross action between fully decohered branches, for instance.
And acausal trade isn’t genuine action.
Finally, weird metaphysics includes the possibility that cause&effect don’t work across universes in a standard way. It’s inconsistent to hold causation constant whilst entertaining weirdness about everything else.
So we are by no means forced into the pragmatic, acting-as-if, form of the argument. Even though it’s less contentious than the lets-just-collapse-ontology-and-epistemology form.
it seems to me like they are real to us, for all intents and purposes. What else would existence even mean?
It can mean something objective that doesn’t depend on values, even if that something is epistemically inaccessible. There’s no rule that words can only have epistemically accessible meanings.
Carroll uses it as a reason to dismiss cosmological models where Boltzmann brains dominate, when he should’ve instead taken it as a sign that his fundamental metaphysics/anthropics/epistemology need work, because this looping should never be able to happen in the first place (even if you entertain crazy hypotheses).
It’s highly undesirable to have a three way trade off between strength, consistency and completeness in mathematical logic … but thats the world we live in .. one that is not the most epistemically convenient.
Which is not to say that I take Boltzmann brains very seriously ..
there are also freak observers that, by sheer coincidence, are coherent for more than one moment.
But relatively few, since each individual observer-moment is a separate coincidence, so you are not likely to be one.
While I agree with the basic point, that decision, theory requires metaphysycs, there some wackiness on the way, not all from you.
To start with Paul Christiano’s wackiness
That doesn’t seem true as stated. It doesn’t seem likely that reality can actually be several different things simultaneously, when viewed by people with different preferences, or that it can seem different according to preferences.
It does seem that ontology is underdetermined by empiricism, IE different people with the same set of observations will come to different beliefs...and that might well have something to do with different values.
If one doesn’t care about other universes ,or futures where one is not alive, one could treat them as nonexistent for decision making purposes, which is a more reasonable , but less literal interpretation of Christiano’s claim. But that’s not a serious ontological claim, and doesnt require a change in the meaning of “to exist”.
These nuances are important, because there is a lot of bad philosophy out there, and a lot of it originates from un-nuanced takes such as “we don’t know reality” and “it’s all perception”.
It’s possible and common to value reality per se, and that makes that kind of DT much more complex than one that values observations or dollar rewards.
It’s not no-matter-what, because these other universes don’t necessarily exist.
And also , you dont get the ability to act on them free with their existence. There’s no cross action between fully decohered branches, for instance.
And acausal trade isn’t genuine action.
Finally, weird metaphysics includes the possibility that cause&effect don’t work across universes in a standard way. It’s inconsistent to hold causation constant whilst entertaining weirdness about everything else.
So we are by no means forced into the pragmatic, acting-as-if, form of the argument. Even though it’s less contentious than the lets-just-collapse-ontology-and-epistemology form.
It can mean something objective that doesn’t depend on values, even if that something is epistemically inaccessible. There’s no rule that words can only have epistemically accessible meanings.
It’s highly undesirable to have a three way trade off between strength, consistency and completeness in mathematical logic … but thats the world we live in .. one that is not the most epistemically convenient.
Which is not to say that I take Boltzmann brains very seriously ..
But relatively few, since each individual observer-moment is a separate coincidence, so you are not likely to be one.