I may just be missing something here, but how does the choice of source code work in the “decisions are the result of source code” ontology? It seems like it creates an infinite regression problem.
If I’m able to make the choice about what my source code is which determines my future decisions then it seems like a CDT/EDT agent will do exactly the same thing as an FDT one and choose the source code that gets good results in Newcomb problems etc.
But if the source code I choose is a result of my previous source code which is a result of my previous source code etc it seems like you get infinite recursion.
You don’t choose source code, you only choose what sort of source code it is, how it behaves, what’s predictable about it. You choose the semantics that describes it. Or the code determines the semantics that describes it, it determines how it behaves, in this framing you are the source code. The effects of the source code (on predictions about it, on outcomes of actions taken by agents running it) vary with its possible behavior, not with the code itself.
There are two options for my source code: {pay up after being picked up in deserts, don’t pay up after being picked up in deserts}. What does the source code ontology say about how I pick which of these source codes to run and how does it differ from the EDT ontology of choice? Or is this question framed incorrectly?
Consider a space of possible partial behaviors of the code (traces/lists/sequences of facts/details that could’ve been established/observed/decided by some point in code’s interpretation/running, but also infinite traces from all always, and responses to some/all possible and impossible observations). Quotiented by some equivalence. The actual behavior is some point in that space. The code itself could be reframed as an operator acting on this space, computing more details from the details that have been established so far, with the actual behavior being the least fixpoint of that operator, starting from the least informative point (partial behavior). Semantics of programming languages, especially in denotational tradition, can look somewhat like this. The space of partial behaviors is often called a domain (or matches some technical definition of a thing called a domain).
So the possible ontology of decision making with a fixed source code is reframing it as deciding which point of the domain it determines. That is, the only thing being decided by an agent in this ontology is the point of the domain, and everything else that happens as a result is a consequence of that, because predictors or implementations or static analyses depend on which point in the domain the code’s semantics determines.
You can choose what your source code is in the following sense: If you pick A, your source code will have been such that you picked A. If you pick B, your source code will have been such that you picked B.
This seems like what choosing always is with a compatibilist understanding of free will? EDT seems to work with no problems with combtablism about free will.
Unless I’m wrong, EDT will right-box if there is a visible bomb in the left box (all agents who discover a bomb in the left box and take left box get less utility than those who take the right box), but FDT (correctly) wouldn’t.
I may just be missing something here, but how does the choice of source code work in the “decisions are the result of source code” ontology? It seems like it creates an infinite regression problem.
If I’m able to make the choice about what my source code is which determines my future decisions then it seems like a CDT/EDT agent will do exactly the same thing as an FDT one and choose the source code that gets good results in Newcomb problems etc.
But if the source code I choose is a result of my previous source code which is a result of my previous source code etc it seems like you get infinite recursion.
You don’t choose source code, you only choose what sort of source code it is, how it behaves, what’s predictable about it. You choose the semantics that describes it. Or the code determines the semantics that describes it, it determines how it behaves, in this framing you are the source code. The effects of the source code (on predictions about it, on outcomes of actions taken by agents running it) vary with its possible behavior, not with the code itself.
There are two options for my source code: {pay up after being picked up in deserts, don’t pay up after being picked up in deserts}. What does the source code ontology say about how I pick which of these source codes to run and how does it differ from the EDT ontology of choice? Or is this question framed incorrectly?
Consider a space of possible partial behaviors of the code (traces/lists/sequences of facts/details that could’ve been established/observed/decided by some point in code’s interpretation/running, but also infinite traces from all always, and responses to some/all possible and impossible observations). Quotiented by some equivalence. The actual behavior is some point in that space. The code itself could be reframed as an operator acting on this space, computing more details from the details that have been established so far, with the actual behavior being the least fixpoint of that operator, starting from the least informative point (partial behavior). Semantics of programming languages, especially in denotational tradition, can look somewhat like this. The space of partial behaviors is often called a domain (or matches some technical definition of a thing called a domain).
So the possible ontology of decision making with a fixed source code is reframing it as deciding which point of the domain it determines. That is, the only thing being decided by an agent in this ontology is the point of the domain, and everything else that happens as a result is a consequence of that, because predictors or implementations or static analyses depend on which point in the domain the code’s semantics determines.
You can choose what your source code is in the following sense: If you pick A, your source code will have been such that you picked A. If you pick B, your source code will have been such that you picked B.
This seems like what choosing always is with a compatibilist understanding of free will? EDT seems to work with no problems with combtablism about free will.
Unless I’m wrong, EDT will right-box if there is a visible bomb in the left box (all agents who discover a bomb in the left box and take left box get less utility than those who take the right box), but FDT (correctly) wouldn’t.