Rather, the predictions are learning about your action. Look for what happens in physics, not for what “happens” in Platonia. That you’ll believe something means that there are events in place that’ll cause the belief to appear, and these events can be observed. When Omega reconstructs your decision, it answers a specific question about a property of the real world. The meaning of this question is your actual decision. This decision is connected to Omega’s mind by processes that propagate evidence, mostly from common sources. Mathematical semantics is just a way of representing properties of this process, for example the fact that a correctly predicted algorithm will behave the same as the original algorithm of which this one is a prediction.
The trouble with decision-making is that you care about the effect of your choice, and so about the effect of predictions (or future reconstructions) of your choice. It’s intuitively confusing that you can affect the past this way. This is a kind of problem of free will for the evidence about your future decisions found in the past. Just as it’s not immediate to see how you can have free will in deterministic world, it’s not immediate how the evidence about your future decisions can have the same kind of free will. Even more so, the confusion is deepened by the fact that the evidence about your future action, while having free will, is bound to perform exactly the same action as you yourself will in the future.
Since both you and predictions about you seem to entertain a kind of free will, it’s tempting to say that you are in fact all of them. But only the real you is most accurate, and others are reconstructed under the goal of getting as close as possible to the original.
Rather, the predictions are learning about your action. Look for what happens in physics, not for what “happens” in Platonia. That you’ll believe something means that there are events in place that’ll cause the belief to appear, and these events can be observed. When Omega reconstructs your decision, it answers a specific question about a property of the real world. The meaning of this question is your actual decision. This decision is connected to Omega’s mind by processes that propagate evidence, mostly from common sources. Mathematical semantics is just a way of representing properties of this process, for example the fact that a correctly predicted algorithm will behave the same as the original algorithm of which this one is a prediction.
The trouble with decision-making is that you care about the effect of your choice, and so about the effect of predictions (or future reconstructions) of your choice. It’s intuitively confusing that you can affect the past this way. This is a kind of problem of free will for the evidence about your future decisions found in the past. Just as it’s not immediate to see how you can have free will in deterministic world, it’s not immediate how the evidence about your future decisions can have the same kind of free will. Even more so, the confusion is deepened by the fact that the evidence about your future action, while having free will, is bound to perform exactly the same action as you yourself will in the future.
Since both you and predictions about you seem to entertain a kind of free will, it’s tempting to say that you are in fact all of them. But only the real you is most accurate, and others are reconstructed under the goal of getting as close as possible to the original.