As an agent when you think about the aspects of the future that you yourself may be able to influence, your predictions have to factor in what actions you will take. But your choices about what actions to take will in turn be influenced by these predictions.
To achieve an equilibrium you are restricted to predicting a future such that your predicting it will not cause you to also predict yourself taking actions that will prevent it (otherwise you would have to change predictions).
Do you have an example for that? It seems to me you’re describing circular process, in which you’d naturally look for stable equilibria. Basically prediction will influence action, action will influence prediction, something like that. But I don’t quite get it how the circle works.
Say I’m the agent faced with a decision. I have some options, I think through the possible consequences of each, and I choose the option that leads to the best outcome according to some metric. I feel it would be fair to say that the predictions I’m making about the future determine which choice I’ll make.
What I don’t see is how the choice I end up making influences my prediction about the future. From my perspective the first step is predicting all possible futures and the second step execution the action that leads to the best future. Whatever option I end up selecting, it was already reasoned through beforehand, as were all the other options I ended up not selecting. Where’s the feedback loop?
I believe they way it works is that FDT tells you to make the bad decision (here: suicide) if faced with the actual situation, but the argument is that you won’t get into the situation at all or less often because you’re playing FDT.
By the time you find yourself facing the problem in which FDT recommends killing yourself something’s already gone wrong, because the situation ought to be prevented by playing FDT in the first place.
But of course the question always is: should you actually find yourself in the decision problem, despite being an FDT-agent that ought to never get here, should you still follow FDT?
I’d argue the answer is “lol no” but I believe the argument in favor is to assume you’re just “hypothetical you”, evaluating the situation without having to bear the cost. E.g. you’re just a simulated version omega spon up to check how you’d react in this decision, not “actual you” who’s faced with the decision. After all “actual you” is not supposed to even get into the situation. If you truly believe that, then chances are you’re not you, because that’d mean omega is wrong, which is extremely unlikely.