What does it mean for instrumentalism to be the correct metaphysics? Normally, I’d interpret “the correct metaphysics” as saying something basic about reality or the universe. (Or, if you’re an instrumentalist and you say “X is the correct metaphysics”, I’d assume you were saying “it’s useful to have a model that treats X as a basic fact about reality or the universe”, which also doesn’t make sense to me if X is “instrumentalism”.)
Like I said before, it means that instrumentalism is the point of view that is the most useful for designing AI or answering questions about AI. According to the “Yudkowskian computationalist” metaphilosophical view, this also makes it the most useful for rationality in general.
Adding hidden variables to QM doesn’t make the theory any more realist, the way we’re using “realist” here.
I imagined “realist” to mean something like “the universe can be described in a way independent of the choice of observer, and the perceptions of any given observer can be decoded from the history of the universe in this description, s.t. different observers have compatible observations”. Adding hidden variables does make QM more realist in this sense, for example the de Broglie-Bohm interpretation is realist (but it only makes sense if you assume all observer perceptions can be reduced to configuration variables, which seems false and disqualifies it). MWI fails to be entirely realist because you have to either make the decoding of observer perceptions stochastic (and thereby admit that your description of the universe is incomplete) or to postulate, for each “normal” observer Alice, a huge ensemble of different observers that correspond to versions of Alice in different Everett branches (and thereby lose the physical meaning of quantum probabilities and with it essentially all the predictive power of the theory).
Like I said before, it means that instrumentalism is the point of view that is the most useful for designing AI or answering questions about AI. According to the “Yudkowskian computationalist” metaphilosophical view, this also makes it the most useful for rationality in general.
Except that if you are the kind of rationalist who cares about what is really real, you should reject instrumentalism immediately.
Like I said before, it means that instrumentalism is the point of view that is the most useful for designing AI or answering questions about AI. According to the “Yudkowskian computationalist” metaphilosophical view, this also makes it the most useful for rationality in general.
I imagined “realist” to mean something like “the universe can be described in a way independent of the choice of observer, and the perceptions of any given observer can be decoded from the history of the universe in this description, s.t. different observers have compatible observations”. Adding hidden variables does make QM more realist in this sense, for example the de Broglie-Bohm interpretation is realist (but it only makes sense if you assume all observer perceptions can be reduced to configuration variables, which seems false and disqualifies it). MWI fails to be entirely realist because you have to either make the decoding of observer perceptions stochastic (and thereby admit that your description of the universe is incomplete) or to postulate, for each “normal” observer Alice, a huge ensemble of different observers that correspond to versions of Alice in different Everett branches (and thereby lose the physical meaning of quantum probabilities and with it essentially all the predictive power of the theory).
Except that if you are the kind of rationalist who cares about what is really real, you should reject instrumentalism immediately.