Some confusion remains appropriate, because for example there is still no satisfactory account of a sense in which the behavior of one program influences the behavior of another program (in the general case, without constructing these programs in particular ways), with neither necessarily occurring within the other at the level of syntax. In this situation, the first program could be said to control the second (especially if it understands what’s happening to it), or the second program could be said to perform analysis of (reason about) the first.
Just Turing machines / lambda terms, or something like that. And “behavior” is however you need to define it to make a sensible account of the dependence between “behaviors”, or of how one of the “behaviors” produces a static analysis of the other. The intent is to capture a key building block of acausal consequentialism in a computational setting, which is one way of going about formulating free will in a deterministic world.
(You don’t just control the physical world through your physical occurrence in it, but also for example through the way other people are reasoning about your possible behaviors, and so an account that simply looks for your occurrence in the world as a subterm/part misses an important aspect of what’s going on. As Turing machines also illustrate, not having subterm/part structure.)
Some confusion remains appropriate, because for example there is still no satisfactory account of a sense in which the behavior of one program influences the behavior of another program (in the general case, without constructing these programs in particular ways), with neither necessarily occurring within the other at the level of syntax. In this situation, the first program could be said to control the second (especially if it understands what’s happening to it), or the second program could be said to perform analysis of (reason about) the first.
What do you mean by programs here?
Just Turing machines / lambda terms, or something like that. And “behavior” is however you need to define it to make a sensible account of the dependence between “behaviors”, or of how one of the “behaviors” produces a static analysis of the other. The intent is to capture a key building block of acausal consequentialism in a computational setting, which is one way of going about formulating free will in a deterministic world.
(You don’t just control the physical world through your physical occurrence in it, but also for example through the way other people are reasoning about your possible behaviors, and so an account that simply looks for your occurrence in the world as a subterm/part misses an important aspect of what’s going on. As Turing machines also illustrate, not having subterm/part structure.)