I jumped off a small cliff into a lake once, and when I was standing on the rock, I couldn’t bring myself to jump. I stepped back to let another person go, and then I stepped onto the rock and jumped immediately. I might be able to do something similar.
But I wouldn’t be able to endorse such behavior while reflecting on it if I were in that situation, given my conviction that I am unable to change math. Indeed, I don’t think it would be wise of me to cooperate in that situation. What I really mean when I say that I would rather be someone who cooperated in a twin prisoners dilemma is “conditioned the (somewhat odd) hypothetical that I will at some point end up in a high stakes twin prisoner’s dilemma, I would rather it be the case that I am the sort of person who cooperates”, which is really saying that I would rather play a twin prisoner’s dilemma game against a cooperator than against a defector, which is just an obvious preference for a favorable event to befall me rather than an unfavorable one. In similar news, conditioned on my encountering a situation in the future where somebody checks to see if am I good person, and if I am, they destroy the world, then I would like to become a bad person. Conditioned on my encountering a situation in which someone saves the world if I am devout, I would like to become a devout person.
If I could turn off the part of my brain that forms the question “but why should I cooperate, when I can’t change math?” that would be a path to becoming a reliable cooperator, but I don’t see a path to silencing a valid argument in my brain without a lobotomy (short of possibly just cooperating really fast without thinking, and of course without forming the doubt “wait, why am I trying to do this really fast without thinking?”).
I think it’s worth pointing out that I agree that you can’t change math. I don’t think I can change math. Yet, I would still cooperate. The whole thing about whether we can literally change math is missing a crux. Thankfully, logical counterfactuals are not construed in such a silly way.
This is similar to the debate over whether free will exists when physics is deterministic. “You can’t change the future. It is already fixed...” the poor soul said, before walking off a cliff.
You could just cooperate, without taking such drastic measures, no?
I jumped off a small cliff into a lake once, and when I was standing on the rock, I couldn’t bring myself to jump. I stepped back to let another person go, and then I stepped onto the rock and jumped immediately. I might be able to do something similar.
But I wouldn’t be able to endorse such behavior while reflecting on it if I were in that situation, given my conviction that I am unable to change math. Indeed, I don’t think it would be wise of me to cooperate in that situation. What I really mean when I say that I would rather be someone who cooperated in a twin prisoners dilemma is “conditioned the (somewhat odd) hypothetical that I will at some point end up in a high stakes twin prisoner’s dilemma, I would rather it be the case that I am the sort of person who cooperates”, which is really saying that I would rather play a twin prisoner’s dilemma game against a cooperator than against a defector, which is just an obvious preference for a favorable event to befall me rather than an unfavorable one. In similar news, conditioned on my encountering a situation in the future where somebody checks to see if am I good person, and if I am, they destroy the world, then I would like to become a bad person. Conditioned on my encountering a situation in which someone saves the world if I am devout, I would like to become a devout person.
If I could turn off the part of my brain that forms the question “but why should I cooperate, when I can’t change math?” that would be a path to becoming a reliable cooperator, but I don’t see a path to silencing a valid argument in my brain without a lobotomy (short of possibly just cooperating really fast without thinking, and of course without forming the doubt “wait, why am I trying to do this really fast without thinking?”).
I think it’s worth pointing out that I agree that you can’t change math. I don’t think I can change math. Yet, I would still cooperate. The whole thing about whether we can literally change math is missing a crux. Thankfully, logical counterfactuals are not construed in such a silly way.
This is similar to the debate over whether free will exists when physics is deterministic. “You can’t change the future. It is already fixed...” the poor soul said, before walking off a cliff.