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“Dogpile may look like a search engine you cobbled together with clip-art, but that’s rather the point as it pulls in and ‘curates’ results from various different engines including Google, Yandex and Yahoo, but removes all the ads”.
I am going to use term “real counterfactual” to mean the metaphysical claim that events could have turned out otherwise in reality, and the term “logical counterfactual” to mean the purely hypothetical consideration of something that hasn’t happened.
Decision theory is about choosing possible courses of action according to their utility, which implies choosing them for, among other things, their probability. A future action is an event that has not happened yet. A past counterfactual is an event that didn’t happen. Calculating the probability of either is a similar process. Using counterfactuals in this sense does not imply or require a commitment to their real existence. Counterfactuals are even useful when considering systems known to be deterministic, such as deterministic algorithms. For the determinist, counterfactuals are useful but not true.
An Omega or Laplace’s daemon like agent in a deterministic universe could calculate from exact microstates to exact microstates [*], and so would not need counterfactual macrostates, even of a logical kind. But that does not tell us cognitively limited agents that counterfactuals are not useful to us. We cannot “just” calculate microstates.
And even if the relationship between macrostates and microsates works the way you say, deterministic evolution is a further assumption. Determinism trivially excludes real counterfactuals, whilst having no impact on logical ones (cf compatibilist free will). Determinism is neither a given, nor sufficiently impactive.
[*] although it might hav to exclude itself to avoid Loeian obstacles.
They are making what some consider to be a philosophical mistake and others don’t. The falsifiability of MWI isn’t a scientific fact if it depends on a contentious philosophical claim. By the way, computational zombies, functional duplicates of humans which lack consciousness, can’t be argued against using the same arguments that exclude p-zombies.
Accusations that something or other is a mind-projection generally lack rigorous criteria. The conclusion of a mind-projection argument generally end up supporting the intuitions of the person making it.
We can test whether consciousness causes collapse once we can simulate a person on a quantum computer, so it’s not an interpretation by definition.
Assuming that the simulated person actually has consciousness and isn’t a zombie. That is a very big assumption, and if you ever did perform the experiment , the CCC enthusiasts would fight it on those grounds.
How does a high-school dropout dare to write a series of articles about quantum physics? Only university professors are allowed to have opinions on such topic. Obviously, he must be a crackpot.
Have you noticed that most writings by laypeople on QM actually are crackpottery? RW’s priors are in the right place, at least.
Interpretations by definition make no difference.
Too vague. Interpretations by definition can’t be distinguished empirically, but they can have very different ontological implications.
Yes, I know that philosophy has basically no verification mechanisms and is therefore unable to make progress in the same sense.
It has falsification mechanisms, and it may be the case that nothing has verification mechanisms.
Like most problems in philosophy, the question of whether moral realism is true lacks an accepted truth condition or an accepted way of verifying an answer or an argument for either realism or anti-realism.
It lack specific truth-conditions, but there is still the general truth condition consisting of acceptance by the philosophical community.
There is no such thing as an optimizer except in the mind of a human anthropomorphizing that entity.
Is there some other set of concepts that don’t exist only in the human mind?
Your comment has no relevance, because probablistic laws automatically imply counterfactuals as well. In fact it’s just another way of saying the same thing. I could have shown it in modal logic, too.
There are no “real” counterfactuals, only the models in the observer’s mind, some eventually proven better reflecting observations than others.
You need to argue for that claim, not just state it. The contrary claim is supported by a simple argument: if an even is indeterministic, it need not have happened, or need not have happened that way. Therefore, there is a real possibility that it did not happened, or happened differently—and that is a real counterfactual.
It would be helpful, yes, if they were separable. Free choice as anything other than illusionism is tantamount to dualism.
You need to argue for that claim as well.
Macroscopic indeterminism is sufficient to establish real, not merely logical, counterfactuals.
Besides that, It would be helpful to separate the ideas of dualism , agency and free choice. If the person making the decision is not some ghost in the machine, then they the only thing they can be is the machine, as a total system,. In that case, the question becomes the question of whether the system as a whole can choose, could have chosen otherwise, etc.
But you’re in good company: Sam Harris is similarly confused.
Philosophers did not find this out, however, as they get paid to argue and so love making objections.
Rationality consists of different things that are often add odds with each other. Ratioanlists, however, did not find this out as they are paid to present rationality as a one-size fits all solution.
Etc, etc.
If we fix a particular mental model of this world, then we can answer questions about this model; part of the decision theory problem is deciding what the mental model of this world should be, and that is pretty unclear.
In other words. usefulness (which DT to use) depends on truth (Which world model to use).
What I have an issue with is the apparent break of the L→H mapping when one postulates top-down causation, like free choice, i.e. multiple different H’s reachable from the same microstate.
If there is indeterminism at the micro level , there is not the slightest doubt that it can be amplified to the macro level, because quantum mechanics as an experimental science depends on the ability to make macroscopic records of events involving single particles.
Mere determinism leaves you somewhat worse off, because physics can mean you can’t choose a logically possible action that yields more DT. Choosing to adopt the view that DT is about understanding the world, not grabbing utility, also leaves you worse off, even if determinism isn’t true, because resources that are going into the project of understanding the world aren’t going into maximising utility. One would expect a businessman to make more money than a scientist.
Whatever utility you gain is not your free choice
That’s a statement about the world. Care to justify it?
.We seem to have very different ontologies here,
And very different epistemologies. I am not denying the very possibility of knowing things about reality.
and not converging. Also, telling me what my ontology “should” be is less than helpful :) It helps to reach mutual understanding before giving prescriptions to the other person.
All I am doing is taking you at your word.
You keep saying that it is models all the way down, and there is no way to make true claims about reality. If I am not to take those comments literally, how am I to take them? How am I to guess the correct non-literal interpretation, out of the many possible ones.?
In the view I am describing here “choice” is one of the qualia, a process in the brain. Counterfactuals is another, related, quale, the feeling of possibilities. Claiming anything more is a mind projection fallacy.
That’s an implicit claim about reality. Something can only be a a mind projection if there is nothing in reality corresponding to it. It is not sufficient to say that it is in the head or the model, it also has to not be in the territory, or else it is a true belief, not a mind projection.. To say that something doesn’t exist in reality is to make a claim about reality as much as to say that something does.
The mental model of the world changes with time. I am not even claiming that time passes, just that there is a mental model of the universe, including the counterfactuals, for each moment in the observer’s time.
Again “in the model” does not imply “not in the territory”.
Are you quite sure “they” are a cohesive goup?
Are you quite sure “they” couldn’t possibly include any actual physicists?
So LW never makes sweeping denunciations?