I am guessing the French guy you are thinking of is François Kammerer. To my knowledge, he is the only illusionist advancing that line right now, and Frankish is directly replying to him. Now, part of the project does need to involve what it is about experiences which grounds their normative value. But that’s exactly what I mean to address here:
> Instead, illusionists have to work out what features about pleasure & pain that is responsible for our evaluative stance towards them: what is it about pleasure, in purely material terms, which causes us to judge that it is good? What is a ‘judgment’ here, and what does it require? How do these judgments give us reason to act? This will require a careful act of integrating empirical facts into a system of normative value. I have expressed some doubts about whether this is possible, but it seems that outside of a few papers by François Kammerer, it has not been given a serious try.
Jack Thompson
This appears to be common in many popular conceptions of illusionism, but it is not found in actual writing by illusionist philosophers.
Dennett, “Quining Qualia”:
> Everything real has properties, and since I don’t deny the reality of conscious experience, I grant that conscious experience has properties. I grant moreover that each person’s states of consciousness have properties in virtue of which those states have the experiential content that they do. … Qualia are supposed to be special properties, in some hard-to-define way. My claim—which can only come into focus as we proceed—is that conscious experience has no properties that are special in any of the ways qualia have been supposed to be special.
Frankish, “The Ethical Implications of Illusionism”:
> Illusionists do not claim that conscious experiences are illusory — that we cannot really see, hear, feel pain, and so on. What is illusory, according to the illusionist, are the phenomenal properties of conscious experience — the irreducibly subjective aspect, the private show in the Cartesian Theatre. They are not denying conscious experience but claiming that we have a mistaken conception of what conscious experience is — a conception we find compelling because of the way our introspective systems work.
Sure, let me be more precise. The illusionist position is that I have experiences, but those experiences are not “private, ineffable, intrinsic, and directly apprehensible in consciousness” (Dennett). The only reason to believe that we have qualia (private, ineffable, etc. aspects of experience) is that it seems that way on introspection. But if we can be introspectively wrong about our own experiential states, then why couldn’t we be fooled about whether those states are actually private, ineffable, etc.?
It seems like the only reason to disbelieve illusionism is introspection, that it seems not to be the case introspectively. So if introspection can be shown to be flawed, then you should move towards illusionism because it is otherwise the most parsimonious explanation of consciousness. Consciousness otherwise appears to be this weird thing that physics can’t account for, despite accounting for everything else.
Meanwhile, illusionism about the exterior world is not the most parsimonious explanation; things do in general behave as though there is a consistent physical world.
The Müller-Lyer illusion is a mistake about properties of the world. You see two lines, you think they are the same length in reality, but they aren’t. Okay, but that doesn’t point out any inconsistency in your experience. It shows that your map doesn’t align with the territory, that’s all.
The card trick shows that you can be mistaken about the contents of your own experience. That you can believe you are having an experience of red, when in fact you are not having such an experience.
Nobody claims that you have direct access to the territory (well, almost nobody), but some phenomenal realists believe you have near-direct access to your own map, that you cannot be mistaken about the contents of your own experience. If that kind of phenomenal realism seems dumb to you, then you are probably not the intended target of the post!
In the same survey, decision theorists are as convinced of compatibilism as they are of two-boxing:
https://survey2020.philpeople.org/survey/results/4838?aos=1399
Compatibilism would hold that Omega can indeed be a perfect or near-perfect predictor. For those unfamiliar, compatibilism is the belief that we live in a determinstic world, but that doesn’t mean that we aren’t free. For instance, classical compatibilism holds that “freedom is nothing more than an agent’s ability to do what she wishes in the absence of impediments that would otherwise stand in her way,” (source) even if what an agent wishes is entirely causally determined by the physics in her brain. Even determinists can accept that agents can do things that they want to do!
The sort of free will that implies independence from a predictor would be “libertarian” free will, which only 4% of decision theorists believe in. That 4% cannot explain the overwhelming majority in favor of two-boxing.
The rationale for two-boxing that Nozick describes in the original paper has nothing to do with the predictor being wrong. It says that even if the predictor is right, you should still two-box.
Omega has already put either $1M or $0 in Box B. It’s sitting right there.
If Omega put $1M, then I can one-box for $1M or two-box for $1M + $1,000. Therefore I should two-box.
If Omega put $0, then I can one-box for $0 or two-box for $0 + $1,000. Therefore I should two-box.
The point isn’t that Omega is a faulty predictor. The point is that even if Omega is an awesome predictor, then what you do now can’t magically fill or empty box B. Two-boxers of this type would love to precommit to one-boxing ahead of time, since that would causally change Omega’s prediction. They just don’t think it’s rational to one-box after the prediction has already been made.
Maybe I’m just rehashing what you said in your edit :) In any case, I think that is the most sympathetic argument for two-boxing if you take the premise seriously. I still think it’s wrong (I’m a dedicated one-boxer), but I don’t think the error is believing that the predictor is mistaken.
If you think many philosophers are idiots, how do you explain the fact that in the PhilPapers survey, decision theorists are substantially more likely to endorse two-boxing than other philosophers, while those most supportive of one-boxing are aesthetic philosophers and Ancient Greek/Roman philosophers? I’m not suggesting that decision theorists are more or less intelligent than aesthetic philosophers, but if your theory is correct why is it that the class of philosophers that is more mathematically rigorous in analyzing decision theory scenarios is most convinced that one-boxing is wrong? [edit: typo.]
I agree! But on that hypothesis, I do find it surprising that not one of them mentions timeless/updateless/functional decision theory. I didn’t cherry-pick these, but I suppose that could have been a fluke—I think I saw Gemini reference FDT once when I was messing around in AI Studio before.
A good future test for me will be to generate a bunch of Newcomblike problems, try to phrase them in less-familiar language, and see if they still reason the same way, as well as prompting to make the scenario feel like it has more real-world stakes.
I see. I suppose you’d do this by creating a policy node that is subjunctively upstream of every individual FDT decision, and intervening on that. The possible values would be every combination of FDT decisions, and you’d calculate updateless expected value over them.
This seems to work, though I’ll think on it some more. I’m a little disappointed that this isn’t the formulation of FDT in the paper, since that feels like a pretty critical distinction. But in any case, I should have read more carefully, so that’s on me. Thank you for bringing that up! Your comment is now linked in the introduction :)
Also failing to replicate, same setup and no personal instructions.