If you were a Calvinist, which path would you take?
Answering as a hypothetical ideal rationalist thrust into a predestination connundrum then I must follow in Yvain’s footsteps and live a life of sin if and only if I would two-box on Newcomb’s problem. More specifically, I wouldn’t live a life of sin because that’d be stupid. Hell bad. Paradise good.
But the real answer to “If you were a Calvinist which path would you take?” would be quite different. A Calvinist would take actions determined by the same cultural influences that made him a Calvinist. In most cases the abstract philosophical positions have very little influence on behavior. He would go ahead and take actions that protect his self image, without realising that this was what he was doing.
Given that I happen to have the mixed fortune of taking my verbally expressed beliefs rather literally, I would be a far more unpredictable Calvinist. I expect my path would follow much the same path as I did as my actual, non-counterfactual self. I would take the path of virtue, for reasoning much the same as Yvain’s.
Yet that is hardly the end of the scenario. It turns out that being motivated by rational argument based on a literal belief is not nearly as robust as being motivated by self-image, or peer approval. Social motivation is stable, or at least it is dynamic in a way that it is considered stable. If you go around actually believing things then pesky things like evidence go around getting in the way, along with some confusion as to why other Calvinists don’t seem to process this evidence in a vaguely sane way.
Answering as a hypothetical ideal rationalist thrust into a predestination connundrum then I must follow in Yvain’s footsteps and live a life of sin if and only if I would two-box on Newcomb’s problem. More specifically, I wouldn’t live a life of sin because that’d be stupid. Hell bad. Paradise good.
But the real answer to “If you were a Calvinist which path would you take?” would be quite different. A Calvinist would take actions determined by the same cultural influences that made him a Calvinist. In most cases the abstract philosophical positions have very little influence on behavior. He would go ahead and take actions that protect his self image, without realising that this was what he was doing.
Given that I happen to have the mixed fortune of taking my verbally expressed beliefs rather literally, I would be a far more unpredictable Calvinist. I expect my path would follow much the same path as I did as my actual, non-counterfactual self. I would take the path of virtue, for reasoning much the same as Yvain’s.
Yet that is hardly the end of the scenario. It turns out that being motivated by rational argument based on a literal belief is not nearly as robust as being motivated by self-image, or peer approval. Social motivation is stable, or at least it is dynamic in a way that it is considered stable. If you go around actually believing things then pesky things like evidence go around getting in the way, along with some confusion as to why other Calvinists don’t seem to process this evidence in a vaguely sane way.