Eliezer,
Forgive me if i’ve misunderstood but I get the impression from your writings here that you believe no claim can be about reality unless there is some physical configuration of the universe, some state that can be described at the quark level, which would count as evidence against that claim. Claims about morality, by such a standard, cannot be about reality.
On a somewhat unrelated note, do you think the critics of logical positivism were wrong? As I read what you have written here it seems like the philosophy you are expounding is more or less the same old logical positivism, just with special emphasis on bayesian updating and (in the case of this post) palatability.
Eliezer once wrote that “We can build up whole networks of beliefs that are connected only to each other—call these “floating” beliefs. It is a uniquely human flaw among animal species, a perversion of Homo sapiens’s ability to build more general and flexible belief networks.
The rationalist virtue of empiricism consists of constantly asking which experiences our beliefs predict—or better yet, prohibit.”
I can’t see how nearly all of the beliefs expressed in this post predict or prohibit any experience.