“Now” is the time at which you can make interventions. Subjective experience lines up with that because it can’t be casually compatible with being in the future, and it maximizes the info available to make the decision with. Or rather, approximately maximizes subject to processing constraints: things get weird if you start really trying to ask whether “now” is “now” or “100 ms ago”.
That’s sort of an answer that seems like it depends on a concept of free will, though. To which my personal favorite response is… how good is your understanding of counterfactuals? Have you written a program that tries to play a two-player game, like checkers or go? If you have, you’ll discover that your program is completely deterministic, yet has concepts like “now” and “if I choose X instead of Y” and they all just work.
Build an intuitive understanding of how that program works, and how it has both a self-model and understanding of counterfactuals while being deterministic in a very limited domain, and you’ll be well under way to dissolving this confusion. (Or at least, I’ve spent a bunch of hours on such programs and I find the analogy super useful; YMMV and I’m probably typical-minding too much here.)
I could not really make sense of your comment, though I had actually done what you proposed a couple of years ago, until I had read Lucius Bushnaq‘s comment. Did that imply what you were trying to tell me or is there another aspect to what you call an intuitive understanding?
“Now” is the time at which you can make interventions. Subjective experience lines up with that because it can’t be casually compatible with being in the future, and it maximizes the info available to make the decision with. Or rather, approximately maximizes subject to processing constraints: things get weird if you start really trying to ask whether “now” is “now” or “100 ms ago”.
That’s sort of an answer that seems like it depends on a concept of free will, though. To which my personal favorite response is… how good is your understanding of counterfactuals? Have you written a program that tries to play a two-player game, like checkers or go? If you have, you’ll discover that your program is completely deterministic, yet has concepts like “now” and “if I choose X instead of Y” and they all just work.
Build an intuitive understanding of how that program works, and how it has both a self-model and understanding of counterfactuals while being deterministic in a very limited domain, and you’ll be well under way to dissolving this confusion. (Or at least, I’ve spent a bunch of hours on such programs and I find the analogy super useful; YMMV and I’m probably typical-minding too much here.)
I could not really make sense of your comment, though I had actually done what you proposed a couple of years ago, until I had read Lucius Bushnaq‘s comment. Did that imply what you were trying to tell me or is there another aspect to what you call an intuitive understanding?