Hanson: I suppose I might still be missing something, but this still seems to me just a simple example of time inconsistency
In my motivations and in my decision theory, dynamic inconsistency is Always Wrong. Among other things, it always implies an agent unstable under reflection.
A more familiar example is that we’d like to commit ahead of time to spending effort to punish people who hurt us, but after they hurt us we’d rather avoid spending that effort as the harm is already done.
But a self-modifying agent would modify to not rather avoid it.
Gowder: If a), then practical reason is meaningless anyway: you’ll do what you’ll do, so stop stressing about it.
Deterministic != meaningless. Your action is determined by your motivations, and by your decision process, which may include your stressing about it. It makes perfect sense to say: “My future decision is determined, and my stressing about it is determined; but if-counterfactual I didn’t stress about it, then-counterfactual my future decision would be different, so it makes perfect sense for me to stress about this, which is why I am deterministically doing it.”
The past can’t change—does not even have the illusion of potential change—but that doesn’t mean that people who, in the past, committed a crime, are not held responsible just because their action and the crime are now “fixed”. It works just the same way for the future. That is: a fixed future should present no more problem for theories of moral responsibility than a fixed past.
Hanson: I suppose I might still be missing something, but this still seems to me just a simple example of time inconsistency
In my motivations and in my decision theory, dynamic inconsistency is Always Wrong. Among other things, it always implies an agent unstable under reflection.
A more familiar example is that we’d like to commit ahead of time to spending effort to punish people who hurt us, but after they hurt us we’d rather avoid spending that effort as the harm is already done.
But a self-modifying agent would modify to not rather avoid it.
Gowder: If a), then practical reason is meaningless anyway: you’ll do what you’ll do, so stop stressing about it.
Deterministic != meaningless. Your action is determined by your motivations, and by your decision process, which may include your stressing about it. It makes perfect sense to say: “My future decision is determined, and my stressing about it is determined; but if-counterfactual I didn’t stress about it, then-counterfactual my future decision would be different, so it makes perfect sense for me to stress about this, which is why I am deterministically doing it.”
The past can’t change—does not even have the illusion of potential change—but that doesn’t mean that people who, in the past, committed a crime, are not held responsible just because their action and the crime are now “fixed”. It works just the same way for the future. That is: a fixed future should present no more problem for theories of moral responsibility than a fixed past.