I’m not sure where you got the idea that this was to solve the spurious counterfactuals problem, that was in the appendix because I anticipated that a MIRI-adjacent person would want to know how it solves that problem.
The core problem it’s solving is that it’s a well-defined mathematical framework in which (a) there are, in some sense, choices, and (b) it is believed that these choices correspond to the results of a particular Turing machine. It goes back to the free will vs determinism paradox, and shows that there’s a formalism that has some properties of “free will” and some properties of “determinism”.
A way that EDT fails to solve 5 and 10 is that it could believe with 100% certainty that it takes $5 so its expected value for $10 is undefined. (I wrote previously about a modification of EDT to avoid this problem.)
CDT solves it by constructing physically impossible counterfactuals which has other problems, e.g. suppose there’s a Laplace’s demon that searches for violations of physics and destroys the universe if physics is violated; this theoretically shouldn’t make a difference but it messes up the CDT counterfactuals.
It does look like your post overall agrees with the view I presented. I would tend to call augmented reality “metaphysics” in that it is a piece of ontology that goes beyond physics. I wrote about metaphysical free will a while ago and didn’t post it on LW because I anticipated people would be allergic to the non-physicalist philosophical language.
I’m not sure where you got the idea that this was to solve the spurious counterfactuals problem, that was in the appendix because I anticipated that a MIRI-adjacent person would want to know how it solves that problem.
Thanks for that clarification.
A way that EDT fails to solve 5 and 10 is that it could believe with 100% certainty that it takes $5 so its expected value for $10 is undefined
I suppose that demonstrates that the 5 and 10 problem is a broader problem than I realised. I still think that it’s only a hard problem within particular systems that have a vulnerability to it.
It does look like your post overall agrees with the view I presented. I would tend to call augmented reality “metaphysics” in that it is a piece of ontology that goes beyond physics
Yeah, we have significant agreement, but I’m more conservative in my interpretations. I guess this is a result of me being, at least in my opinion, more skeptical of language. Like I’m very conscious of arguments where someone says, “X could be described by phrase Y” and then later they rely on connations of Y that weren’t proven.
For example, you write, “From the AI’s perspective, it has a choice among multiple actions, hence in a sense “believing in metaphysical free will”. I would suggest it would be more accurate to write: “The AI models the situation as though it had free will” which leaves open the possibility that it is might be just a pragmatic model, rather than the AI necessarily endorsing itself as possessing free will.
Another way of framing this: there’s an additional step in between observing that an agent acts or models a situation as it believes in freewill and concluding that it actually believes in freewill. For example, I might round all numbers in a calculation to integers in order to make it easier for me, but that doesn’t mean that I believe that the values are integers.
Thanks for reading all the posts!
I’m not sure where you got the idea that this was to solve the spurious counterfactuals problem, that was in the appendix because I anticipated that a MIRI-adjacent person would want to know how it solves that problem.
The core problem it’s solving is that it’s a well-defined mathematical framework in which (a) there are, in some sense, choices, and (b) it is believed that these choices correspond to the results of a particular Turing machine. It goes back to the free will vs determinism paradox, and shows that there’s a formalism that has some properties of “free will” and some properties of “determinism”.
A way that EDT fails to solve 5 and 10 is that it could believe with 100% certainty that it takes $5 so its expected value for $10 is undefined. (I wrote previously about a modification of EDT to avoid this problem.)
CDT solves it by constructing physically impossible counterfactuals which has other problems, e.g. suppose there’s a Laplace’s demon that searches for violations of physics and destroys the universe if physics is violated; this theoretically shouldn’t make a difference but it messes up the CDT counterfactuals.
It does look like your post overall agrees with the view I presented. I would tend to call augmented reality “metaphysics” in that it is a piece of ontology that goes beyond physics. I wrote about metaphysical free will a while ago and didn’t post it on LW because I anticipated people would be allergic to the non-physicalist philosophical language.
Thanks for that clarification.
I suppose that demonstrates that the 5 and 10 problem is a broader problem than I realised. I still think that it’s only a hard problem within particular systems that have a vulnerability to it.
Yeah, we have significant agreement, but I’m more conservative in my interpretations. I guess this is a result of me being, at least in my opinion, more skeptical of language. Like I’m very conscious of arguments where someone says, “X could be described by phrase Y” and then later they rely on connations of Y that weren’t proven.
For example, you write, “From the AI’s perspective, it has a choice among multiple actions, hence in a sense “believing in metaphysical free will”. I would suggest it would be more accurate to write: “The AI models the situation as though it had free will” which leaves open the possibility that it is might be just a pragmatic model, rather than the AI necessarily endorsing itself as possessing free will.
Another way of framing this: there’s an additional step in between observing that an agent acts or models a situation as it believes in freewill and concluding that it actually believes in freewill. For example, I might round all numbers in a calculation to integers in order to make it easier for me, but that doesn’t mean that I believe that the values are integers.