This seems like a trivial idea, interesting mostly insofar as it dispels unnecessary mysteriousness of physical world, but not particularly meaningful or helpful otherwise.
I can’t find anything to disagree with after this quoted sentence, but “this seems like a trivial idea” certainly isn’t something I’d say if someone else wrote the comment you’re replying to. My guess is that you think “makes decision theory much easier” gives Tegmark too much credit because decision theory is far from solved, there are lots of hard problems left, and Tegmark’s ideas represent only a small step, in a relative sense, compared to the overall difficulty of the project.
If my guess is right, I could offer the defense that it feels like a large amount of progress to me, in an absolute sense, but it might be a good idea to just rephrase that sentence to avoid giving the wrong impression. Or, let me know if I’m totally off base and you intended a different point entirely.
I mean only that the description I sketched (which might be seen as referring the the idea of “mathematical universe”, but also deconstructs some of it, suggesting that it’s meaningless to insist that something “is a mathematical structure”), isn’t saying much of anything, and uses only standard ideas from mathematics; in this sense the idea of “mathematical universe” doesn’t say much of anything either (i.e. is trivial).
It might be a useful point to the extent that understanding it would banish useless ways of metaphysical theorizing about the physical world and free up time for more fruitful activities. So, my comment is unrelated to your point about decision theory, although the simplification (back to triviality) may be useful there and probably more relevant than for most other problems.
I can’t find anything to disagree with after this quoted sentence, but “this seems like a trivial idea” certainly isn’t something I’d say if someone else wrote the comment you’re replying to. My guess is that you think “makes decision theory much easier” gives Tegmark too much credit because decision theory is far from solved, there are lots of hard problems left, and Tegmark’s ideas represent only a small step, in a relative sense, compared to the overall difficulty of the project.
If my guess is right, I could offer the defense that it feels like a large amount of progress to me, in an absolute sense, but it might be a good idea to just rephrase that sentence to avoid giving the wrong impression. Or, let me know if I’m totally off base and you intended a different point entirely.
I mean only that the description I sketched (which might be seen as referring the the idea of “mathematical universe”, but also deconstructs some of it, suggesting that it’s meaningless to insist that something “is a mathematical structure”), isn’t saying much of anything, and uses only standard ideas from mathematics; in this sense the idea of “mathematical universe” doesn’t say much of anything either (i.e. is trivial).
It might be a useful point to the extent that understanding it would banish useless ways of metaphysical theorizing about the physical world and free up time for more fruitful activities. So, my comment is unrelated to your point about decision theory, although the simplification (back to triviality) may be useful there and probably more relevant than for most other problems.