No, what I mean is that you should taboo “self-modification” and see what happens to your argument. If I decide, today, that I will go on a diet, is that not a weaker form of self-modifying? It is an attempt to bind future selves to a decision made today. Granted, it is a weak binding, as we all know; but to say “self-modification” is just to dismiss that difficulty, assuming that in the future we can overcome akrasia. Well, the future will contain many wonderful things, but I’m not convinced a cure for weak-willedness is among them! So “self-modification” becomes, when tabooed, “decide, with additional future inventions making me able to overcome the natural temptation to re-decide”; and I think this is a much more useful formulation. The reason is that we all have some experience with deciding to do something, and can perhaps form some impression of how much help we’re going to need from the future inventions; while we have zero experience with this magical “self-modification”, and can form no intuition of how powerful it is.
We do have some experience with self-modification, in the form of self-modifying programs. That is, programs that either write directly into their own executable memory, or (since modern CPUs tend to prohibit this) write out an executable file and then call exec on it.
No, what I mean is that you should taboo “self-modification” and see what happens to your argument. If I decide, today, that I will go on a diet, is that not a weaker form of self-modifying? It is an attempt to bind future selves to a decision made today. Granted, it is a weak binding, as we all know; but to say “self-modification” is just to dismiss that difficulty, assuming that in the future we can overcome akrasia. Well, the future will contain many wonderful things, but I’m not convinced a cure for weak-willedness is among them! So “self-modification” becomes, when tabooed, “decide, with additional future inventions making me able to overcome the natural temptation to re-decide”; and I think this is a much more useful formulation. The reason is that we all have some experience with deciding to do something, and can perhaps form some impression of how much help we’re going to need from the future inventions; while we have zero experience with this magical “self-modification”, and can form no intuition of how powerful it is.
We do have some experience with self-modification, in the form of self-modifying programs. That is, programs that either write directly into their own executable memory, or (since modern CPUs tend to prohibit this) write out an executable file and then call exec on it.
But anyway, I think I get your point.