My intuition is that if you are trying to draw causal graphs that do something other than draw arrows from x to f(x) (where f is something like a decision theory), then you are doing something wrong. But I guess I could be wrong about this. However, the point stands that it won’t be possible to distinguish CDT and EDT without either finding a plausible causal graph which doesn’t have the property I want, or talking about an agent that doesn’t have access to its own internal states immediately prior to the decision theory computation (and it seems reasonable to say that such an agent is badly designed).
After thinking more specifically about my example, I think it is based on mistakenly conflating two conceptual divisions of the process in question into action vs computation. I think it is still good as an example of approximately how badly designed an agent needs to be before CDT and EDT become distinct.
My intuition is that if you are trying to draw causal graphs that do something other than draw arrows from x to f(x) (where f is something like a decision theory), then you are doing something wrong. But I guess I could be wrong about this. However, the point stands that it won’t be possible to distinguish CDT and EDT without either finding a plausible causal graph which doesn’t have the property I want, or talking about an agent that doesn’t have access to its own internal states immediately prior to the decision theory computation (and it seems reasonable to say that such an agent is badly designed).
After thinking more specifically about my example, I think it is based on mistakenly conflating two conceptual divisions of the process in question into action vs computation. I think it is still good as an example of approximately how badly designed an agent needs to be before CDT and EDT become distinct.