The usual story of acausal coordination involves agent P modeling agent Q, and Q modeling P. Put differently, both P and Q model the joint system (P+Q) that has both P and Q in it. But it doesn’t have to be (P+Q), it could be some much simpler R instead. I think a more central example of acausal coordination is to simply follow shared ideas.
The unusual character of acausal coordination is caused by cases where R is itself an agent, an adjudicator between P and Q. As a shared idea, it would have instances in minds of both P and Q, and command some influence allowed by P and Q over their actions. It would need to use some sort of functional decision theory to make sense of its situation where it controls the world through causally unrelated actions of P and Q that only have R’s algorithm in common behind them.
The adjudicator R doesn’t need to be anywhere as complicated as P or Q, in particular it doesn’t need to know P or Q in detail. Which makes it much easier for P and Q to know R than to know each other. It’s just neither P nor Q that’s doing the acausal coordination, it’s R instead.
The usual story of acausal coordination involves agent P modeling agent Q, and Q modeling P. Put differently, both P and Q model the joint system (P+Q) that has both P and Q in it. But it doesn’t have to be (P+Q), it could be some much simpler R instead. I think a more central example of acausal coordination is to simply follow shared ideas.
The unusual character of acausal coordination is caused by cases where R is itself an agent, an adjudicator between P and Q. As a shared idea, it would have instances in minds of both P and Q, and command some influence allowed by P and Q over their actions. It would need to use some sort of functional decision theory to make sense of its situation where it controls the world through causally unrelated actions of P and Q that only have R’s algorithm in common behind them.
The adjudicator R doesn’t need to be anywhere as complicated as P or Q, in particular it doesn’t need to know P or Q in detail. Which makes it much easier for P and Q to know R than to know each other. It’s just neither P nor Q that’s doing the acausal coordination, it’s R instead.