I’m a little confused: you reject physicalism, and yet you seem to be speaking from a physicalist ontology here, requiring there to be a physical fact (a true configuration) or no fact at all (no indexical information).
I believe there are physical theories and physical facts, but that not all facts are straightforwardly physical (although, perhaps these are indirectly physical in a way that requires significant philosophical and conceptual work to determine, and which has degrees of freedom).
The issue in this post is about physical facts, e.g. measurements, needing to be interpreted in terms of a physical reality. These interpretations are required to have explanatory physical theories even if there are also non-physical facts.
Hmmm. So facts aren’t exclusively physical in nature, but physical theories need to do all their explanatory work on their own, without reference to any of the nonphysical facts? I’m still pretty confused. The post makes a lot more sense to me if I read it as yet another puzzle for physicalism, rather than something directly related to your actual ontology.
Naively (ie in my naive understanding) it seems like an agent-centric perspective (ie the opposite of a view from nowhere) is more or less like Solomonoff induction (so e.g. solves anthropic reasoning via UDASSA). The world is built outward from the agent, rather than the other way around, but we still get something like indexical facts. So many-worlds seems ok.
It’s rather nonstandard to consider things like photon measurements to be nonphysical facts. Presumably, these come within the domain of physical theories.
Suppose we go with Solomonoff induction. Then we only adopt physical theories that explain observations happening over subjective time. These observations include discrete physical measurements.
It’s not hard to see how Bohm explains these measurements: they are facts about the true configuration history.
It is hard to see how many worlds explains these measurements. Some sort of bridge law is required. The straightworward way of specifying the bridge law is the Bohm interpretation.
I’m a little confused: you reject physicalism, and yet you seem to be speaking from a physicalist ontology here, requiring there to be a physical fact (a true configuration) or no fact at all (no indexical information).
I believe there are physical theories and physical facts, but that not all facts are straightforwardly physical (although, perhaps these are indirectly physical in a way that requires significant philosophical and conceptual work to determine, and which has degrees of freedom).
The issue in this post is about physical facts, e.g. measurements, needing to be interpreted in terms of a physical reality. These interpretations are required to have explanatory physical theories even if there are also non-physical facts.
Hmmm. So facts aren’t exclusively physical in nature, but physical theories need to do all their explanatory work on their own, without reference to any of the nonphysical facts? I’m still pretty confused. The post makes a lot more sense to me if I read it as yet another puzzle for physicalism, rather than something directly related to your actual ontology.
Naively (ie in my naive understanding) it seems like an agent-centric perspective (ie the opposite of a view from nowhere) is more or less like Solomonoff induction (so e.g. solves anthropic reasoning via UDASSA). The world is built outward from the agent, rather than the other way around, but we still get something like indexical facts. So many-worlds seems ok.
It’s rather nonstandard to consider things like photon measurements to be nonphysical facts. Presumably, these come within the domain of physical theories.
Suppose we go with Solomonoff induction. Then we only adopt physical theories that explain observations happening over subjective time. These observations include discrete physical measurements.
It’s not hard to see how Bohm explains these measurements: they are facts about the true configuration history.
It is hard to see how many worlds explains these measurements. Some sort of bridge law is required. The straightworward way of specifying the bridge law is the Bohm interpretation.