I understand it’s a proposition like any other, I don’t see why an agent would reflect on it/use it in their deliberation to decide what to do. The fact that they’re a CDT agent is a fact about how they will act in the decision, not a fact that they need to use in their deliberation
Analogous to preferences, whether or not an agent prefers A or B is a proposition like any other, but I don’t think it’s a natural way to model them as first consult the credences they have assigned to “I prefer A to B” etc. Rather, they will just choose A ex hypothesis because that’s what having the preference means.
They don’t have to, and for the purposes of the thought experiment you could specify that they simply don’t. But humans are often pretty uncertain about their own preferences, and about what kind of decision theory they can or should use. Many of these humans are pretty strongly inclined to deliberate, reflect, and argue about these beliefs, and take into account their own uncertainty in them when making decisions.
So I’m saying that if you stipulate that no such reflection or deliberation occurs, you might be narrowing the applicability of the thought experiment to exclude human-like minds, which may be a rather large and important class of all possible minds.
I understand it’s a proposition like any other, I don’t see why an agent would reflect on it/use it in their deliberation to decide what to do. The fact that they’re a CDT agent is a fact about how they will act in the decision, not a fact that they need to use in their deliberation
Analogous to preferences, whether or not an agent prefers A or B is a proposition like any other, but I don’t think it’s a natural way to model them as first consult the credences they have assigned to “I prefer A to B” etc. Rather, they will just choose A ex hypothesis because that’s what having the preference means.
They don’t have to, and for the purposes of the thought experiment you could specify that they simply don’t. But humans are often pretty uncertain about their own preferences, and about what kind of decision theory they can or should use. Many of these humans are pretty strongly inclined to deliberate, reflect, and argue about these beliefs, and take into account their own uncertainty in them when making decisions.
So I’m saying that if you stipulate that no such reflection or deliberation occurs, you might be narrowing the applicability of the thought experiment to exclude human-like minds, which may be a rather large and important class of all possible minds.