“In our naive ontology, when we are faced with a decision, we conceive of ourselves as having free will in the sense of there being multiple choices that we could actually take. These choices are conceived of as actual and we when think about the notion of the “best possible choice” we see ourselves as comparing actual possible ways that the world could be. However, we when start investigating the nature of the universe, we realise that it is essentially deterministic and hence that our naive ontology doesn’t make sense. This forces us to ask what it means to make the “best possible choice” in a deterministic ontology where we can’t literally take a choice other than the one that we make. This means that we have to try to find something in our new ontology that roughly maps to our old one.”
We expect a straightforward answer to “What is a decision theory as a mathematical object?”, since we automatically tend to assume our ontology is consistent, but if this isn’t the case and we actually have to repair our ontology, it’s unsurprising that we end up with different kinds of objects.
My take: Counterfactuals are Confusing because of an Ontological Shift:
“In our naive ontology, when we are faced with a decision, we conceive of ourselves as having free will in the sense of there being multiple choices that we could actually take. These choices are conceived of as actual and we when think about the notion of the “best possible choice” we see ourselves as comparing actual possible ways that the world could be. However, we when start investigating the nature of the universe, we realise that it is essentially deterministic and hence that our naive ontology doesn’t make sense. This forces us to ask what it means to make the “best possible choice” in a deterministic ontology where we can’t literally take a choice other than the one that we make. This means that we have to try to find something in our new ontology that roughly maps to our old one.”
We expect a straightforward answer to “What is a decision theory as a mathematical object?”, since we automatically tend to assume our ontology is consistent, but if this isn’t the case and we actually have to repair our ontology, it’s unsurprising that we end up with different kinds of objects.