My personal objection to this seems to be: “But what if some things DO exist?” IE, what if existence actually does turn out to be a thing, in limited supply?
Let me try to unfold this gut reaction into something which makes more sense.
I think what I’m “really” saying is that, for me, this view does not add up to normality. If I were to discover that “existence” is meaningless as a global predicate, and (to the extent that it’s meaningful) all possibilities exist equally, I would change the way I care about things.
I think I value variety, so I would be happy at this news: I would have a nice, comfortable lower bound on my utility function, contributed by all the other universes. (As far as variety goes, I can now focus my energy on optimizing the local branches containing me.)
I would think about death differently: before learning about the meaninglessness of existence, I placed inherent value on my life, and also placed value on what I might contribute to the world, and (almost as a side note) also would be sad about my family missing me if I was gone. Now it’s about my family and friends, who would miss me in a large measure of branches. My unique contributions to society, however, are guaranteed to be preserved in some branches; that part of me survives any accident. (This is similar to the quantum suicide argument.)
I would also be excited about the possibility of interaction between parallel universes, since for any two turing machines, there is a third which runs them in parallel but with some form of interaction (in fact, every possible form of interaction).
All told, my value function would not be anywhere close to equivalent to a Solomonoff weighting!
Additionally, it’s interesting to note that I treat the idea (that existence has no referent) as a hypothesis, and it’s a hypothesis which I believe I can collect evidence for and against:
The book “theory of nothing” by Russel Standish contains a derivation of the Schrodinger equation from axioms which are supposed to be purely about an ideal observer and the process of observation. If this argument were convincing, I would take it as strong evidence for the hypothesis: if we can derive the (otherwise strange and surprising) workings of quantum mechanics from the assumption that we’re an ideal observer sitting inside of Tegmark IV, that’s decent evidence for Tegmark IV.
For better or worse, the argument isn’t so convincing: my main objection is that it slips complex numbers in as an assumption, rather than deriving them from the assumptions. So, the complex-valued wave function is not explained.
There is a derivation of quantum logic from the logic of self-reference, and I consider this to be very weak evidence for the hypothesis.
Bruno Marchal does work along these lines, and discusses a world-view with some similarities to what Coscott proposes.
My personal objection to this seems to be: “But what if some things DO exist?” IE, what if existence actually does turn out to be a thing, in limited supply?
Let me try to unfold this gut reaction into something which makes more sense.
I think what I’m “really” saying is that, for me, this view does not add up to normality. If I were to discover that “existence” is meaningless as a global predicate, and (to the extent that it’s meaningful) all possibilities exist equally, I would change the way I care about things.
I think I value variety, so I would be happy at this news: I would have a nice, comfortable lower bound on my utility function, contributed by all the other universes. (As far as variety goes, I can now focus my energy on optimizing the local branches containing me.)
I would think about death differently: before learning about the meaninglessness of existence, I placed inherent value on my life, and also placed value on what I might contribute to the world, and (almost as a side note) also would be sad about my family missing me if I was gone. Now it’s about my family and friends, who would miss me in a large measure of branches. My unique contributions to society, however, are guaranteed to be preserved in some branches; that part of me survives any accident. (This is similar to the quantum suicide argument.)
I would also be excited about the possibility of interaction between parallel universes, since for any two turing machines, there is a third which runs them in parallel but with some form of interaction (in fact, every possible form of interaction).
All told, my value function would not be anywhere close to equivalent to a Solomonoff weighting!
Additionally, it’s interesting to note that I treat the idea (that existence has no referent) as a hypothesis, and it’s a hypothesis which I believe I can collect evidence for and against:
The book “theory of nothing” by Russel Standish contains a derivation of the Schrodinger equation from axioms which are supposed to be purely about an ideal observer and the process of observation. If this argument were convincing, I would take it as strong evidence for the hypothesis: if we can derive the (otherwise strange and surprising) workings of quantum mechanics from the assumption that we’re an ideal observer sitting inside of Tegmark IV, that’s decent evidence for Tegmark IV.
For better or worse, the argument isn’t so convincing: my main objection is that it slips complex numbers in as an assumption, rather than deriving them from the assumptions. So, the complex-valued wave function is not explained.
There is a derivation of quantum logic from the logic of self-reference, and I consider this to be very weak evidence for the hypothesis.
Bruno Marchal does work along these lines, and discusses a world-view with some similarities to what Coscott proposes.