TAG

• TAG 23 Jul 2019 9:49 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: Sinclair Chen's comment on: If physics is many-wor­lds, does ethics mat­ter?

  Or (3) the sky causes my rain to be wet when it rains.

  Where does moral agency come in, if any­where? Does the uni­verse make things worse if a bunch of peo­ple die of a plague? Is the uni­verse a moral agent? Is any­thing in it?

  The ques­tion is about ethics. Say­ing there is still causal­ity in MWI doesn’t an­swer it, be­cause it doesn’t ex­plain whether ethics deflates to causal­ity or causal­ity in­flates to ethics.

• TAG 22 Jul 2019 17:18 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: Donald Hobson's comment on: If physics is many-wor­lds, does ethics mat­ter?

  Ap­ply­ing the gen­er­al­ized anti zom­bie prin­ci­ple says that it would have the feel­ing of mak­ing a choice.

  The GAZP still isn’t any kind of knowl­edge or un­der­stand­ing. A func­tional du­pli­cate of an en­tity that re­ports hav­ing such-and-such a quale will re­port hav­ing it even if doesn’t. So you can’t in­fer any­thing un­am­bigu­ous from a re­port of a quale.

  There might be branches where we make a differ­ent rea­son­able de­ci­sion.

  There will be branches where we com­mit crimes if it is not im­pos­si­ble.

  I ex­pect quan­tum ethics to have a util­ity func­tion that is some mea­sure of what com­pu­ta­tions are be­ing done, and the quan­tum am­pli­tude that they are done with.

  The stick­ing point is the mo­tion of mak­ing a differ­ence.

• TAG 22 Jul 2019 11:57 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: dxu's comment on: Ra­tion­al­ity is Sys­tem­atized Winning

  If there are ob­jec­tively cor­rect and false val­ues, then it mat­ters to the epistemic ra­tio­nal­ist which sub­jec­tive val­ues they have, be­cause they might be wrong. (it also mat­ters to the ER whether val­ues are sub­jec­tive).

  Epistemic and in­stru­men­tal ra­tio­nal­ity have never been the same thing. “Ra­tion­al­ity is win­ning” can­not define them both, but and, as it hap­pens, only defines IR.

• TAG 14 Jul 2019 11:24 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: mr-hire's comment on: If physics is many-wor­lds, does ethics mat­ter?

  It’s not an ex­pla­na­tion un­less we know how it’s true.

• TAG 13 Jul 2019 7:09 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: Aleksi Liimatainen's comment on: If physics is many-wor­lds, does ethics mat­ter?

  Yeah, sub­jec­tive ex­pe­riences are real.

  It’s rather ques­tion beg­ging to equate the real and the ob­jec­tive.

  Point is, there’s no term for them or any of our other men­tal­is­tic con­cepts in physics

  There’s no term for shop­ping cen­tres in physics. You need to look at whether there is a way of re­duc­ing some­thing, not whether there is a term for it.

  You can re­define them to fit but it seemed to me that TAG was try­ing to ap­ply the in­tu­itive no­tion of mean­ing in the con­text of phys­i­cal de­ter­minism.

  I was try­ing to ap­ply the in­tu­itive mean­ings of choice and mak­ing a differ­ence to de­ter­minism.

  Hence, lean­ing fur­ther into the frame in or­der to prop­a­gate the up­date.

  I have no idea what that means.

  Once you get the mind as a phys­i­cal thing, it adds up to nor­mal­ity again.

  We don’t know how the mind is phys­i­cal, so you are ad­vis­ing peo­ple to adopt a sort of faith.

  Is phys­i­cal­ism a falsifi­able claim? What would ev­i­dence against it look like?

• TAG 13 Jul 2019 7:08 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: mr-hire's comment on: If physics is many-wor­lds, does ethics mat­ter?

  Sub­jec­tive ex­pe­riences are ob­jects in an ob­jec­tive frame yes?

  We don’t know.

• TAG 13 Jul 2019 7:05 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: Aleksi Liimatainen's comment on: If physics is many-wor­lds, does ethics mat­ter?

  Since we dont know that the uni­verse is de­ter­minis­tic, I don’t see the point in think­ing in purely de­ter­minis­tic terms.

  If some­one some­where claims that the there is still “choice” and “mak­ing a differ­ence” in a de­ter­minis­tic uni­verse, then the mean­ings of “choice” and “mak­ing a differ­ence” are rele­vant. Maybe you are not that per­son.

• TAG 12 Jul 2019 10:16 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: sirjackholland's comment on: If physics is many-wor­lds, does ethics mat­ter?

  Wor­lds can differ in mea­sure, al­though no one is quite sure what that means.

• TAG 12 Jul 2019 9:09 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: Aleksi Liimatainen's comment on: If physics is many-wor­lds, does ethics mat­ter?

  It’s clear that choices and efforts can be part of a causal chain that brings about an out­come, even in a de­ter­minis­tic uni­verse. It’s also clear that you can­not choose one out­come over an­other, or to strive more than you were de­ter­mined to, in a de­ter­minis­tic uni­verse. Be­cause of the lat­ter, it is hard to cash out the mean­ing of “you should strive to be good”. What does it mean to say that you should strive to be good if you have no choice?

• TAG 12 Jul 2019 9:04 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: giroth's comment on: If physics is many-wor­lds, does ethics mat­ter?

  What about one path with in­de­ter­minism? Copen­hagen, IOW.

• TAG 11 Jul 2019 14:35 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: shminux's comment on: If physics is many-wor­lds, does ethics mat­ter?

  As some­one who is not a great friend of MWI,I found that poorly ar­gued. She doesnt be­lieve in other branches be­cause they are un­ob­serv­able. She does be­lieve in the in­te­rior of black holes, though no one has come back with a re­port on them.. be­cause the­ory says they are ob­serv­able. But what are MWIers bas­ing things on ex­cept the­ory?

  So she is pick­ing and choos­ing be­tween the­o­ries.. al­though she claims not to be, el­se­where!

• TAG 11 Jul 2019 14:28 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: Closed Limelike Curves's comment on: If physics is many-wor­lds, does ethics mat­ter?

  If free will can be illu­sion, so can ethics.

• TAG 11 Jul 2019 14:27 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: Dan Fitch's comment on: If physics is many-wor­lds, does ethics mat­ter?

  If A is the more eth­i­cal choice, you should still try to strive to­wards A, so that more of you in all the pos­si­ble wor­lds also strive to­wards A.

  MWI is de­ter­minis­tic, so how much striv­ing you do or do not do is de­ter­mined.

• TAG 11 Jul 2019 14:25 UTC

  0 points

  in reply to: Donald Hobson's comment on: If physics is many-wor­lds, does ethics mat­ter?

  The hy­poth­e­sis that when a hu­man makes a choice, the uni­verse splits and ev­ery pos­si­ble choice is made with equal mea­sure is co­her­ent, falsifi­able and clearly wrong

  Maybe, but MWI doesn’t im­ply equal mea­sure.

  They would still have the feel­ing of mak­ing a choice

  We don’t know that be­cause we don’t know any­thing about qualia.

  To the ex­tent that you are op­ti­miz­ing, not out­putting ran­dom noise, you aren’t cre­at­ing mul­ti­ple uni­verses. It all adds up to normality

  There is not always a sin­gle op­ti­mal solu­tion to a prob­lem even for a perfect ra­tio­nal­ist, and hu­mans aren’t perfect ra­tio­nal­ists.

  A com­plete quan­tum ethics will be bet­ter than any clas­si­cal ethics (al­most iden­ti­cal in ev­ery­day cir­cum­stances) , but one lit­tle mis­take and you get non­sense.

  What do you think quan­tum ethics would look like?

• TAG 11 Jul 2019 13:36 UTC

  3 points

  in reply to: orthonormal's comment on: If physics is many-wor­lds, does ethics mat­ter?

  If you have al­tru­is­tic mo­ti­va­tion, then the Everett branches start­ing from here are in fact bet­ter (in ex­pec­ta­tion) than the branches start­ing from a similar uni­verse with a ver­sion of you that has no al­tru­is­tic mo­ti­va­tion.

  Yes.

  By work­ing to do good, you are in a mean­ingful sense caus­ing the mul­ti­verse to con­tain a higher pro­por­tion of good wor­lds than it oth­er­wise would.

  No.

  You are con­flat­ing two differ­ent kinds of coun­ter­fac­tual. In the first sen­tence, coun­ter­fac­tual mul­ti­verses that con­tain a less well in­ten­tioned ver­sion of you have worse out­comes. But that is an ex­tra-phys­i­cal kind of coun­ter­fac­tual, it’s like imag­in­ing differ­entt laws of physics.

  So it is not some­thing you can choose or af­fect within a mul­ti­verse. Within a mul­ti­verse, coun­ter­fac­tu­als are Everett branches that you are not in, and there is noth­ing the “you” that is em­bed­ded in a mul­ti­verse can do to af­fect them. Every­thing pro­ceeds de­ter­minis­ti­cally, in­clud­ing how well in­ten­tioned you are, in­clud­ing how much work you do, in­clud­ing how you change and evolve. So there is no “than it oth­er­wise would” in a real sense, only in a con­cep­tual sense

• TAG 9 Jul 2019 12:02 UTC

  3 points

  in reply to: rohinmshah's comment on: What’s the most “stuck” you’ve been with an ar­gu­ment, that even­tu­ally got re­solved?

  It seems to me that the crux of that ar­gu­ment is the as­sump­tion that there is only one di­rec­tion or axis in which some­thing can be con­sid­ered more fun­da­men­tal than some­thing else.

  Ra­tion­al­ity can be episte­molog­i­cally ba­sic, in that you need to be ra­tio­nal to ar­rive at physics, and physics can be on­tolog­i­cally ba­sic in that ra­tio­nal agents are made of mat­ter.

  Some­times the solu­tion is to drop the fram­ing that the two al­ter­na­tives are ac­tu­ally ri­valrous.

• TAG 8 Jul 2019 21:08 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: Charlie Steiner's comment on: Is “phys­i­cal non­de­ter­minism” a mean­ingful con­cept?

  I’m happy to re­ply that the mes­sage of my com­ment as a whole ap­plies to this part

  I found parts of your com­ment as a whole to be un­clear or un­der­ar­gued,which is why I asked the ques­tions l.

  —my claim about “what things do at a ba­sic level of de­scrip­tion” is a meta-model claim about what you can say about things at differ­ent lev­els of de­scrip­tion.

  I don’t see how you can know what the most ba­sic level of de­scrip­tion looks like. (I pre­vi­ously phrased that as a ques­tion, which did me no good).

  A claim to the effect that no the­o­ret­i­cal term ap­plies athe­o­ret­i­cally might prove too much - - it might be more of a gen­eral point than the OP was get­ting at.

  We might imag­ine some­one say­ing “I know there are some de­ter­minis­tic mod­els of atoms and some non­de­ter­minis­tic mod­els, but are the atoms re­ally de­ter­minis­tic or not?”

  Well, there a kind of fake in­de­ter­minism based on an ob­servers lack of in­for­ma­tion. Some­one could ask­ing a ques­tion about that rather than what is true athe­o­ret­i­cally.

  Be­cause they’re part of a de­tailed model of the world that helps tell a “func­tional and causal story” about the phe­nomenon. If I was go­ing to bad­mouth one set of essences just to prop up an­other, I would have said so

  You seem to be happy enough with func­tional and causal.

  My point is that this resi­due is never go­ing to be the “Real Prop­er­ties,” they’re just go­ing to be the same the­ory-laden prop­er­ties as always

  Are you ar­gu­ing it or stat­ing it?

  What makes a the­ory of ev­ery­thing a the­ory of ev­ery­thing is not that it pro­vides a fi­nal an­swer for which prop­er­ties are the real prop­er­ties that atoms have in some athe­o­retic di­rect way. It’s that it pro­vides a use­ful frame­work in which we can un­der­stand all (liter­ally all) sorts of stuff

  Maybe. Phys­i­cal­ism as­serts the op­po­site, so an ar­gu­ment would be helpful.

• TAG 2 Jul 2019 12:39 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: Mary Chernyshenko's comment on: The Com­pe­tence Myth

  It’s easy to be com­pe­tent at easy things.

• TAG 2 Jul 2019 12:38 UTC

  2 points

  on: The Com­pe­tence Myth

  In­com­pe­tent com­pared to what? Let’s say that a lot of peo­ple are in­com­pe­tent at their jobs. You can solve that by mak­ing jobs eas­ier, so that any­one can do them but that isn’t a nett benefit be­cause now the difficult jobs aren’t be­ing done at all. Even though some peo­ple could do them. Mean­ing their tal­ents would be wasted.

  So maybe the sys­tem com­pro­mises be­tween do­ing difficult things and do­ing things com­pe­tently. Maybe that’s an over­all op­ti­mi­sa­tion.

• TAG 19 Jun 2019 16:04 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: steven0461's comment on: Is “phys­i­cal non­de­ter­minism” a mean­ingful con­cept?

  I thought you were refer­ring to col­lapse in that way.