You’ve linked me to three different posts, so I’ll address them in separate comments.
Two Alternatives to Logical Counterfactuals
I actually really liked this post—enough that I changed my original upvote to a strong upvote. I also disagree with the notion that logical counterfactuals make sense when taken literally so I really appreciated you making this point persuasively. I agreed with your criticisms of the material condition approach and I think policy-dependent source code could be potentially promising. I guess this naturally leads to the question of how to justify this approach. This results in questions like, “What exactly is a counterfactual?” and “Why exactly do we want such a notion?” and I believe that following this path leads to the discovery that counterfactuals are circular.
I’m more open to saying that I adopt Counterfactual Non-Realism than I was when I originally commented although I don’t see theories based on material conditionals as the only approach within this category. I guess I’m also more enthusiastic about thinking in terms of policies rather than action mainly because of the lesson I drew from the Counterfactual Prisoner’s Dilemma. I don’t really know why I didn’t make this connection at the time, since I had written that post a few months prior, but I appear to have missed this.
I still feel that introducing the term “free will” is too loaded to be helpful here, regardless of whether you are or aren’t using it in a non-standard fashion. Like I’d encourage you to structure your posts to try to separate:
a) This is how we handle counterfactuals b) This is the implications of this for the free will debate
A large part of this is because I suspect many people on Less Wrong are simply allergic to this term.
You’ve linked me to three different posts, so I’ll address them in separate comments.
Two Alternatives to Logical Counterfactuals
I actually really liked this post—enough that I changed my original upvote to a strong upvote. I also disagree with the notion that logical counterfactuals make sense when taken literally so I really appreciated you making this point persuasively. I agreed with your criticisms of the material condition approach and I think policy-dependent source code could be potentially promising. I guess this naturally leads to the question of how to justify this approach. This results in questions like, “What exactly is a counterfactual?” and “Why exactly do we want such a notion?” and I believe that following this path leads to the discovery that counterfactuals are circular.
I’m more open to saying that I adopt Counterfactual Non-Realism than I was when I originally commented although I don’t see theories based on material conditionals as the only approach within this category. I guess I’m also more enthusiastic about thinking in terms of policies rather than action mainly because of the lesson I drew from the Counterfactual Prisoner’s Dilemma. I don’t really know why I didn’t make this connection at the time, since I had written that post a few months prior, but I appear to have missed this.
I still feel that introducing the term “free will” is too loaded to be helpful here, regardless of whether you are or aren’t using it in a non-standard fashion. Like I’d encourage you to structure your posts to try to separate:
a) This is how we handle counterfactuals
b) This is the implications of this for the free will debate
A large part of this is because I suspect many people on Less Wrong are simply allergic to this term.