Q, if you’re already known to be human, the content added will usually be along the lines of “I chose to phi, and I wasn’t threatened into it, and no one bribed me.” :)
However, the part I’m interested in is, “I chose to phi, with an accompanying sensation of uncertainty and freedom.”
This is the sensation that is brought into intuitive conflict with the notion of a lawful universe. Since part of becoming a rationalist is learning to be a native of a lawful universe, it’s important to understand that the sensation of uncertainty and freedom is something that happens within a lawful universe. Since, in fact, nothing precious is lost in acknowledging this, I deem that saying “nothing precious is lost in acknowledging this” may prove helpful to people becoming rationalists.
The empirical content of this sensation is that the choice was not overdetermined so strongly as to require no deliberation, and that several options were labeled “reachable” by your search process, and had to be judged. Where, if we wanted to understand the search process, we would interpret the “reachable” label as meaning “This is what would happen if-counterfactually the judgment of this system were to take this action.” Though in this case the search process is an evolved adaptation and was never designed to have an interpretation per se; the mind’s code is not commented.
Q, if you’re already known to be human, the content added will usually be along the lines of “I chose to phi, and I wasn’t threatened into it, and no one bribed me.” :)
However, the part I’m interested in is, “I chose to phi, with an accompanying sensation of uncertainty and freedom.”
This is the sensation that is brought into intuitive conflict with the notion of a lawful universe. Since part of becoming a rationalist is learning to be a native of a lawful universe, it’s important to understand that the sensation of uncertainty and freedom is something that happens within a lawful universe. Since, in fact, nothing precious is lost in acknowledging this, I deem that saying “nothing precious is lost in acknowledging this” may prove helpful to people becoming rationalists.
The empirical content of this sensation is that the choice was not overdetermined so strongly as to require no deliberation, and that several options were labeled “reachable” by your search process, and had to be judged. Where, if we wanted to understand the search process, we would interpret the “reachable” label as meaning “This is what would happen if-counterfactually the judgment of this system were to take this action.” Though in this case the search process is an evolved adaptation and was never designed to have an interpretation per se; the mind’s code is not commented.