I don’t think I’m capable of writing something like the metaethics sequence about IB, that’s a job for someone else. My own way of evaluating philosophical claims is more like:
Can we a build an elegant, coherent mathematical theory around the claim?
Does the theory meet reasonable desiderata?
Does the theory play nicely with other theories we have high confidence of?
If there are compelling desiderata the theory doesn’t meet, can we show that meeting them is impossible?
For example, the way I understood objective morality is wrong was by (i) seeing that there’s a coherent theory of agents with any utility function whatsoever (ii) understanding that, in terms of the physical world, “Vanessa’s utility function” is more analogous to “coastline of Africa” than to “fundamental equations of physics”.
I agree that explaining why we have certain intuitions is a valuable source of evidence, but it’s entangled with messy details of human psychology that create a lot of noise. (Notice that I’m not saying you shouldn’t use intuition, obviously intuition is an irreplaceable core part of cognition. I’m saying that explaining intuition using models of the mind, while possible and desirable, is also made difficult by the messy complexity of human minds, which in particular introduces a lot of variables that vary between people.)
Also, I want to comment on your last tagline, just because it’s too tempting:
how does the fact that larger quantum amplitudes correspond to more magical happening-ness relate to the question of how much more I should care about a simulation running on a computer with wires that are twice as thick???
I haven’t written the proofs cleanly yet (because prioritizing other projects atm), but it seems that IB physicalism produces a rather elegant interpretation of QM. Many-worlds turns out to be false. The wavefunction is not “a thing that exists”. Instead, what exists is the outcomes of all possible measurements. The universe samples those outcomes from a distribution that is determined by two properties: (i) the marginal distribution of each measurement has to obey the Born rule (ii) the overall amount of computation done by the universe should be minimal. It follows that, outside of weird thought experiments (i.e. as long as decoherence applies), agents don’t get split into copies and quantum randomness is just ordinary randomness. (Another nice consequence is that Boltzmann brains don’t have qualia.)
I don’t think I’m capable of writing something like the metaethics sequence about IB, that’s a job for someone else. My own way of evaluating philosophical claims is more like:
Can we a build an elegant, coherent mathematical theory around the claim?
Does the theory meet reasonable desiderata?
Does the theory play nicely with other theories we have high confidence of?
If there are compelling desiderata the theory doesn’t meet, can we show that meeting them is impossible?
For example, the way I understood objective morality is wrong was by (i) seeing that there’s a coherent theory of agents with any utility function whatsoever (ii) understanding that, in terms of the physical world, “Vanessa’s utility function” is more analogous to “coastline of Africa” than to “fundamental equations of physics”.
I agree that explaining why we have certain intuitions is a valuable source of evidence, but it’s entangled with messy details of human psychology that create a lot of noise. (Notice that I’m not saying you shouldn’t use intuition, obviously intuition is an irreplaceable core part of cognition. I’m saying that explaining intuition using models of the mind, while possible and desirable, is also made difficult by the messy complexity of human minds, which in particular introduces a lot of variables that vary between people.)
Also, I want to comment on your last tagline, just because it’s too tempting:
I haven’t written the proofs cleanly yet (because prioritizing other projects atm), but it seems that IB physicalism produces a rather elegant interpretation of QM. Many-worlds turns out to be false. The wavefunction is not “a thing that exists”. Instead, what exists is the outcomes of all possible measurements. The universe samples those outcomes from a distribution that is determined by two properties: (i) the marginal distribution of each measurement has to obey the Born rule (ii) the overall amount of computation done by the universe should be minimal. It follows that, outside of weird thought experiments (i.e. as long as decoherence applies), agents don’t get split into copies and quantum randomness is just ordinary randomness. (Another nice consequence is that Boltzmann brains don’t have qualia.)
What’s ordinary randomness?