The issue of so-called logical counterfactuals has been discussed here and on the alignment forum quite a few times, including a bunch of posts by Chris_Leong, and at least one by yours truly. Consider browsing through them before embarking on original research:
I have indeed read many of those posts already (though I appreciate some reference to them in the original post would have been sensible, I apologise). Chris_Leong’s Deconfusing Logical Counterfactuals comes pretty close to this—the counterfactual model I’m interested in corresponds to their notion of “Raw Counterfactual”, but AFAICT they’re going in a somewhat different direction with the notion of “erasure” (I don’t think it should be necessary to forget that you’ve seen a full box in the transparent variant of Newcomb’s problem, if you explicitly consider that you be in Omega’s simulation), so they haven’t followed the notion through to a full description of what a raw-counterfactual-based decision theory would look like. I can’t find any further discussion of the idea, and Chris_Leong now seems to be walking back on it (that’s part of the reason I’m asking the question).
I suspect the real underlying issue is that of free will: all decision theories assume we can make different decisions in EXACT SAME circumstances, whereas from what we understand about the physical world, there is no such thing, and the only non-dualist proposal on the table is that of Scott Aaronson’s freebits. I have written a related post last year. We certainly do have a very realistic illusion of free will, to the degree where any argument to the contrary tends to be rejected, ignored, strawmanned or misinterpreted. If you read through the philosophical writings on compatibilism, people keep talking past each other all the time, never getting to the crux of their disagreement. Not that it (or anything else) matters in the universe where there is no freedom of choice, anyway.
whereas from what we understand about the physical world, there is no such thing, and the only non-dualist proposal on the table is that of Scott Aaronson’s freebits.
The issue of so-called logical counterfactuals has been discussed here and on the alignment forum quite a few times, including a bunch of posts by Chris_Leong, and at least one by yours truly. Consider browsing through them before embarking on original research:
https://www.google.com/search?q=logical+counterfactuals+site:lesswrong.com
I have indeed read many of those posts already (though I appreciate some reference to them in the original post would have been sensible, I apologise). Chris_Leong’s Deconfusing Logical Counterfactuals comes pretty close to this—the counterfactual model I’m interested in corresponds to their notion of “Raw Counterfactual”, but AFAICT they’re going in a somewhat different direction with the notion of “erasure” (I don’t think it should be necessary to forget that you’ve seen a full box in the transparent variant of Newcomb’s problem, if you explicitly consider that you be in Omega’s simulation), so they haven’t followed the notion through to a full description of what a raw-counterfactual-based decision theory would look like. I can’t find any further discussion of the idea, and Chris_Leong now seems to be walking back on it (that’s part of the reason I’m asking the question).
I suspect the real underlying issue is that of free will: all decision theories assume we can make different decisions in EXACT SAME circumstances, whereas from what we understand about the physical world, there is no such thing, and the only non-dualist proposal on the table is that of Scott Aaronson’s freebits. I have written a related post last year. We certainly do have a very realistic illusion of free will, to the degree where any argument to the contrary tends to be rejected, ignored, strawmanned or misinterpreted. If you read through the philosophical writings on compatibilism, people keep talking past each other all the time, never getting to the crux of their disagreement. Not that it (or anything else) matters in the universe where there is no freedom of choice, anyway.
That contains two falsehoods.
physics has not settled the issue of determinism versus determinism. See https://philpapers.org/rec/EARDWW
Scott Aaronson is not the first person in history to propose a nondualustic theory of free will.