Suppose that you’re pondering free will, and get to a mental state where you say “it seems like Asher could have driven off the cliff, but it also seems like Asher could not have driven off the cliff”, where you have two tensions in conflict.
Here you might try to clarify things by saying could_A = “Asher has the feeling of ability to drive off the cliff” and could_B = “Asher will drive off the cliff if you run the deterministic universe forward”.
If you let two sides of you argue about which side is right, pick a definition of “could”, conclude from this definition that side A or side B is right, and drop it there, you’ve lost one of your intuitions and thus lost the path to more insights. If you instead define could_A and could_B, then conclude that side A is right under definition A, but side B is right under definition B, then drop it there, you’ve also lost the intuitions. Either way it seems like you’re just internally arguing about whether a taco is a sandwich, and you’re not on track to inventing functional decision theory.
I think there’s some mindset to inhabit where you can stay in touch with both intuitions long enough to actually lay out the assumptions behind each poorly-defined position, and examine them until you get to Eliezer’s position on free will, and then go invent FDT. This seems harder to do in agent foundations than in the average scientific field, but Nate claims it’s possible. The hardest part for me was having the intuitions in the first place.
I claim that you also need a could_C “Asher counterfactually could drive off the cliff” unless you want to be eliminativist about counterfactuals.
I’ve written about this here. Eliezer seems to have found the same solution that I did for the student and exam problem: there’s a distinction between a) being fixed independently of your action b) being fixed given your action.
One exercise we worked through was resolving free will, which is apparently an ancient rationalist tradition. Suppose that Asher drives by a cliff on their way to work but didn’t swerve. The conflicting intuitions are “Asher felt like they could have chosen to swerve off the cliff”, and “the universe is deterministic, so Asher could not have swerved off the cliff”. But to me, this felt like a confusion about the definition of the word “could”, and not some exciting conflict—it’s probably only exciting when you’re in a certain mindset. [edit: I elaborate in a comment]
Becoming deconfused doesn’t have to mean a) finding the one right answer. It can also mean b) there is more than on the right answer c) there are no right answers.
EYs “dissolution” of free will is very much an a)type: the universe is deterministic , so thefeeling of free will is illusory.
An actual deconfusion would notice that you can’t tell whether the universe is deterministic by armchair reflection. And that “Asher could have swerved because the universe isn’t deterministic” is another consistent solution.( Only being able to see one so!union feels like lack of confusion, but isnt).
EY pushes an a) type solution without disproving a b) type (dis)solution. The correct approach includes an element of “more research is needed” as well as an element of “depends on what you mean by”.
The situation with decision theory is similar … there needs to be, but there isnt, a debate on whether a single DT can work for every possible agent in every possible universe.
Could you explain what you see as the confusion?
Suppose that you’re pondering free will, and get to a mental state where you say “it seems like Asher could have driven off the cliff, but it also seems like Asher could not have driven off the cliff”, where you have two tensions in conflict.
Here you might try to clarify things by saying could_A = “Asher has the feeling of ability to drive off the cliff” and could_B = “Asher will drive off the cliff if you run the deterministic universe forward”.
If you let two sides of you argue about which side is right, pick a definition of “could”, conclude from this definition that side A or side B is right, and drop it there, you’ve lost one of your intuitions and thus lost the path to more insights. If you instead define could_A and could_B, then conclude that side A is right under definition A, but side B is right under definition B, then drop it there, you’ve also lost the intuitions. Either way it seems like you’re just internally arguing about whether a taco is a sandwich, and you’re not on track to inventing functional decision theory.
I think there’s some mindset to inhabit where you can stay in touch with both intuitions long enough to actually lay out the assumptions behind each poorly-defined position, and examine them until you get to Eliezer’s position on free will, and then go invent FDT. This seems harder to do in agent foundations than in the average scientific field, but Nate claims it’s possible. The hardest part for me was having the intuitions in the first place.
I claim that you also need a could_C “Asher counterfactually could drive off the cliff” unless you want to be eliminativist about counterfactuals.
I’ve written about this here. Eliezer seems to have found the same solution that I did for the student and exam problem: there’s a distinction between a) being fixed independently of your action b) being fixed given your action.
Becoming deconfused doesn’t have to mean a) finding the one right answer. It can also mean b) there is more than on the right answer c) there are no right answers.
EYs “dissolution” of free will is very much an a)type: the universe is deterministic , so thefeeling of free will is illusory.
An actual deconfusion would notice that you can’t tell whether the universe is deterministic by armchair reflection. And that “Asher could have swerved because the universe isn’t deterministic” is another consistent solution.( Only being able to see one so!union feels like lack of confusion, but isnt).
EY pushes an a) type solution without disproving a b) type (dis)solution. The correct approach includes an element of “more research is needed” as well as an element of “depends on what you mean by”.
The situation with decision theory is similar … there needs to be, but there isnt, a debate on whether a single DT can work for every possible agent in every possible universe.