You need to do the impossible one more time, and make your plans bearing in mind that the true ontology [...] something more than your current intellectual tools allow you to represent.
With the “is” removed and replaced by an implied “might be”, this seems like a good sentiment...
...well, given scenarios in which there were some other process that could come to represent it, such that there’d be a point in using (necessarily-)current intellectual tools to figure out how to stay out of those processes’ way...
...and depending on the relative payoffs, and the other processes’ hypothetical robustness against interference.
(To the extent that decomposing the world into processes that separately come to do things, and can be “interfered with” or not, makes sense at all, of course.)
A more intelligible argument than the specific one you have been making is merely “we don’t know whether there are any hidden philosophical, contextual, or further-future gotchas in whether or not a seemingly valuable future would actually be valuable”. But in that case it seems like you need a general toolset to try to eventually catch the gotcha hypotheses you weren’tby historical accident already disposed to turn up, the same way algorithmic probability is supposed to help you organize your efforts to be sure you’ve covered all the practical implications of hypotheses about non-weird situations. As a corollary: it would be helpful to propose a program of phenomenological investigation that could be expected to cover the same general sort of amount of ground where possible gotchas could be lurking as would designing an AI to approximate a universal computational hypothesis class.
If it matters, the only scenario I can think of specifically relating to quantum mechanics is that there are forms of human communication which somehow are able to transfer qubits, that these matter for something, and that a classical simulation wouldn’t preserve them at the input (and/or the other boundaries).
With the “is” removed and replaced by an implied “might be”, this seems like a good sentiment...
...well, given scenarios in which there were some other process that could come to represent it, such that there’d be a point in using (necessarily-)current intellectual tools to figure out how to stay out of those processes’ way...
...and depending on the relative payoffs, and the other processes’ hypothetical robustness against interference.
(To the extent that decomposing the world into processes that separately come to do things, and can be “interfered with” or not, makes sense at all, of course.)
A more intelligible argument than the specific one you have been making is merely “we don’t know whether there are any hidden philosophical, contextual, or further-future gotchas in whether or not a seemingly valuable future would actually be valuable”. But in that case it seems like you need a general toolset to try to eventually catch the gotcha hypotheses you weren’t by historical accident already disposed to turn up, the same way algorithmic probability is supposed to help you organize your efforts to be sure you’ve covered all the practical implications of hypotheses about non-weird situations. As a corollary: it would be helpful to propose a program of phenomenological investigation that could be expected to cover the same general sort of amount of ground where possible gotchas could be lurking as would designing an AI to approximate a universal computational hypothesis class.
If it matters, the only scenario I can think of specifically relating to quantum mechanics is that there are forms of human communication which somehow are able to transfer qubits, that these matter for something, and that a classical simulation wouldn’t preserve them at the input (and/or the other boundaries).