Eliezer writes that back in 1997, he thought in terms of there being three “hard problems”: along with Chalmers’ hard problem of why anything is conscious, he also proposed that “why there is something rather than nothing” and “how you get an ‘ought’ from an ‘is’” are also Hard Problems.
This bears comparison with Heidegger’s four demarcations of Being, described near the end of An Introduction to Metaphysics: being versus becoming, being versus nonbeing, being versus appearance, being versus “the ought”. Eliezer touches on the last three of these; add his later concerns with “timeless physics” and “timeless decision theory”, and he’s made a theme of all four.
(Incidentally, I don’t consider this list of four to be necessarily exhaustive; one could also argue that being versus possibility is another demarcation, marking Being as the actual rather than the possible. But even that issue is touched upon in Less Wrong metaphysics, via the modal realism of Tegmark’s Level Four multiverse.)
Eliezer writes that back in 1997, he thought in terms of there being three “hard problems”: along with Chalmers’ hard problem of why anything is conscious, he also proposed that “why there is something rather than nothing” and “how you get an ‘ought’ from an ‘is’” are also Hard Problems.
This bears comparison with Heidegger’s four demarcations of Being, described near the end of An Introduction to Metaphysics: being versus becoming, being versus nonbeing, being versus appearance, being versus “the ought”. Eliezer touches on the last three of these; add his later concerns with “timeless physics” and “timeless decision theory”, and he’s made a theme of all four.
(Incidentally, I don’t consider this list of four to be necessarily exhaustive; one could also argue that being versus possibility is another demarcation, marking Being as the actual rather than the possible. But even that issue is touched upon in Less Wrong metaphysics, via the modal realism of Tegmark’s Level Four multiverse.)