(?) It sounds like 'true theory of reality' is something that could be occupied only by a final theory of physics. Decision theory just tells you the objectively best way of acting to satisfy a set of preferences.
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“Objectively best” assuming a set of axioms is satisfied. There can sometimes be a bait-and-switch or motte-and-bailey here when you try to apply this to a concrete real-world situation.
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Do you have a specific example in mind?
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Well, to get decision theory to apply, you have to characterize the situation in terms of a set of well-defined actions, well-defined outcomes, well-defined goodnesses, and you need some meaningful way of estimating probabilities. None of those are objectively given.
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This example isn't analogous but I'm curious how you'd reply to a student saying, "The notion of 'objectively true sentences' is wrong and can't be rescued, because words don't have culturally independent meanings and there's no Objective Teacher to grade answers as correct."
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This has several moving parts, so it’s a bit complicated. First, there is no clear definition of “objective” or “objectively true,” as far as I have been able to discover. There are several pretty different uses that are all quite vague.
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Replying to @Meaningness @ESYudkowsky and
Under some reasonable interpretations of “objectively true,” there aren’t any outside math and possibly QFT. Under some other reasonable interpretations, lots of things are objectively true. Lots of arguments founder on this contrast.
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Suppose I suggested you can have a distinguishable solid subsystem of a fuzzy system. Distinguishing objects in the environment is fuzzy, assigning meaning to "three" is fuzzy, but once counting and naming is done, the arithmetic subsystem is locally quite solid.
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Yes! Rationality works, when it does, because somehow inferences within the mathematical system turn out to be true-enough in the real world.
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Suppose I then suggested that adopting any number of purposes and object distinguishers will nail down this core subsystem surprisingly hard. To the point that alien systems probably agree with ours not only about 2 + 2, but about formulae with no practical use like 85378^397642.
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I agree that math is a domain in which absolute truth applies. (Modulo maybe stuff like the independence of the continuum hypothesis, but let’s ignore that.)
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Okay. What about "absolute" systems that cast nonabsolute prescriptive recipes as shadows, like "try counting digits and adding to estimate the product to within a couple of orders of magnitude"?
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That particular example is just true, isn’t it? (Arithmetic isn’t my strong suit)
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