Against Naive Rationalist Metaphysics

stub, obv. if you're reading this now, like, read the rest of the stub metaphysics posts before you get mad. the take here is nuanced lol

• It's not clear to me that you can construct a consistent utility function from people's values, either in the sense that they would find it a satisfying depiction, and certainly not that it would match their observed behavior. Therefore, EV calculation is probably wrong as a basis for an axiology etc etc
• lol maybe I want to quote aumann
• physicalism, reductionism, and computational theory of consciousness are taken as a fait accompli when this is in fact yet to be demonstrated. yes yes, you can use your metaphysics to generate assumptions, but if it's taken as undeniable then you're making mistakes. in any case your metaphysics distorts the whole landscape of attention and inference, if you're looking for models that smell like physics you'll generate them (see econ) but this is often quite inappropriate b/c we simply don't have models at that resolution and confidence [ I'm not sure I really want to take a jab at econ here but still -- but somethign something, folk tech-y theories of cognitive science etc are what I'm aiming at here to a decent extent]
  • probably can reference discussion with JH here re navier-stokes, reductionism is taken as an axiom and is not quite justified
    • and this is just in principle but the point is, discussions of the mind often begin with an assumption that we have an adequate reductionist model when in fact we seldom do, we're really shooting in the dark to a large extent
  • something like "physicalist-only meaning" (as in, "meaning only derives from external world states") as being like, a. dumb and b. not something anyone actually believes
  • "ways of seeing must placed in a reductionist-materialist metaphysics" is often a thing
• "beliefs are for true things" - what's a belief, and what's a true thing?