Occamite reasoning: One can do away with the Copernican thought by endorsing panpsychism; but this worsens the bite from the principle of parsimony. A universe with two kinds of fundamental fact is less likely, relative to the space of all the models, then one with one kind (or with many, many more than two kinds). It is a striking empirical fact that, consciousness aside, we seem to be able to understand the whole rest of reality with a single grammatical kind of description—the impersonal, ‘objective’ kind, which states a fact without specifying for whom the fact is. The world didn’t need to turn out to be that way, just as it didn’t need to look causally structured. This should give us reason to think that there may not be distinctions between fundamental kinds of facts, rather than that we happen to have lucked out and ended up in one of the universes with very few distinctions of this sort.
The problem is that we already have two kinds of fundamental facts, (and I would argue we need more). Consider Eliezer’s use of “magical reality fluid” in this post. If you look at context, it’s clear that he’s trying to ask whether the inhabitants of the non-causally stimulated universes poses qualia without having to admit he cares about qualia.
Eliezer thinks we’ll someday be able to reduce or eliminate Magical Reality Fluid from our model, and I know of no argument (analogous to the Hard Problem for phenomenal properties) that would preclude this possibility without invoking qualia themselves. Personally, I’m an agnostic about Many Worlds, so I’m even less inclined than EY to think that we need Magical Reality Fluid to recover the Born probabilities.
I also don’t reify logical constructs, so I don’t believe in a bonus category of Abstract Thingies. I’m about as monistic as physicalists come. Mathematical platonists and otherwise non-monistic Serious Scientifically Minded People, I think, do have much better reason to adopt dualism than I do, since the inductive argument against Bonus Fundamental Categories is weak for them.
Eliezer thinks we’ll someday be able to reduce or eliminate Magical Reality Fluid from our model, and I know of no argument (analogous to the Hard Problem for phenomenal properties) that would preclude this possibility without invoking qualia themselves.
I could define the Hard Problem of Reality, which really is just an indirect way of talking about the Hard Problem of Consciousness.
Personally, I’m an agnostic about Many Worlds, so I’m even less inclined than EY to think that we need Magical Reality Fluid to recover the Born probabilities.
As Eliezer discuses in the post, Reality Fluid isn’t just for Many Worlds, it also relates to questions about stimulation.
As Eliezer discuses in the post, Reality Fluid isn’t just for Many Worlds, it also relates to questions about [simulation].
Only as a side-effect. In all cases, I suspect it’s an idle distraction; simulation, qualia, and born-probability models do have implications for each other, but it’s unlikely that combining three tough problems into a single complicated-and-tough problem will help gin up any solutions here.
Here’s my argument for why you should.
Give me an example of some logical constructs you think I should believe in. Understand that by ‘logical construct’ I mean ‘causally inert, nonspatiotemporal object.’ I’m happy to sort-of-reify spatiotemporally instantiated properties, including relational properties. For instance, a simple reason why I consistently infer that 2 + 2 = 4 is that I live in a universe with multiple contiguous spacetime regions; spacetime regions are similar to each other, hence they instantiate the same relational properties, and this makes it possible to juxtapose objects and reason with these recurrent relations (like ‘being two arbitrary temporal intervals before’ or ‘being two arbitrary spatial intervals to the left of’).
The problem is that we already have two kinds of fundamental facts, (and I would argue we need more). Consider Eliezer’s use of “magical reality fluid” in this post. If you look at context, it’s clear that he’s trying to ask whether the inhabitants of the non-causally stimulated universes poses qualia without having to admit he cares about qualia.
Eliezer thinks we’ll someday be able to reduce or eliminate Magical Reality Fluid from our model, and I know of no argument (analogous to the Hard Problem for phenomenal properties) that would preclude this possibility without invoking qualia themselves. Personally, I’m an agnostic about Many Worlds, so I’m even less inclined than EY to think that we need Magical Reality Fluid to recover the Born probabilities.
I also don’t reify logical constructs, so I don’t believe in a bonus category of Abstract Thingies. I’m about as monistic as physicalists come. Mathematical platonists and otherwise non-monistic Serious Scientifically Minded People, I think, do have much better reason to adopt dualism than I do, since the inductive argument against Bonus Fundamental Categories is weak for them.
I could define the Hard Problem of Reality, which really is just an indirect way of talking about the Hard Problem of Consciousness.
As Eliezer discuses in the post, Reality Fluid isn’t just for Many Worlds, it also relates to questions about stimulation.
Here’s my argument for why you should.
Only as a side-effect. In all cases, I suspect it’s an idle distraction; simulation, qualia, and born-probability models do have implications for each other, but it’s unlikely that combining three tough problems into a single complicated-and-tough problem will help gin up any solutions here.
Give me an example of some logical constructs you think I should believe in. Understand that by ‘logical construct’ I mean ‘causally inert, nonspatiotemporal object.’ I’m happy to sort-of-reify spatiotemporally instantiated properties, including relational properties. For instance, a simple reason why I consistently infer that 2 + 2 = 4 is that I live in a universe with multiple contiguous spacetime regions; spacetime regions are similar to each other, hence they instantiate the same relational properties, and this makes it possible to juxtapose objects and reason with these recurrent relations (like ‘being two arbitrary temporal intervals before’ or ‘being two arbitrary spatial intervals to the left of’).