Yeah. This post could also serve, more or less verbatim, as a write-up of my own current thoughts on the matter. In particular, this section really nails it:
As above, my claim is not that the photon disappears. That would indeed be a silly idea. My claim is that the very claim that a photon “exists” is meaningless. We have a map that makes predictions. The map contains a proton, and it contains that proton even outside any areas relevant to predictions, but why should I care? The map is for making predictions, not for ontology.
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I don’t suppose that. I suppose that the concept of a photon actually existing is meaningless andirrelevant to the model.
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This latter belief is an “additional fact”. It’s more complicated than “these equations describe my expectations”.
And the two issues you mention — the spaceship that’s leaving Earth to establish a colony that won’t causally interact with us, and the question of whether other people have internal experiences — are the only two notes of dissonance in my own understanding.
(Actually, I do disagree with “altruism is hard to ground regardless”. For me, it’s very easy to ground. Supposing that the question “Do other people have internal conscious experiences?” is meaningful and that the answer is “yes”, I just very simply would prefer those people to have pleasant experiences rather than unpleasant ones. Then again, you may mean that it’s hard to convince other people to be altruistic, if that isn’t their inclination. In that case, I agree.)
Yeah. This post could also serve, more or less verbatim, as a write-up of my own current thoughts on the matter. In particular, this section really nails it:
And the two issues you mention — the spaceship that’s leaving Earth to establish a colony that won’t causally interact with us, and the question of whether other people have internal experiences — are the only two notes of dissonance in my own understanding.
(Actually, I do disagree with “altruism is hard to ground regardless”. For me, it’s very easy to ground. Supposing that the question “Do other people have internal conscious experiences?” is meaningful and that the answer is “yes”, I just very simply would prefer those people to have pleasant experiences rather than unpleasant ones. Then again, you may mean that it’s hard to convince other people to be altruistic, if that isn’t their inclination. In that case, I agree.)