Certainly. Decision-making itself is also a process that occurs in the map, not the territory; there is no contradiction here. Some people may find the idea of decision-making being anything but a fundamental, ontologically primitive process somehow unsatisfying, or even disturbing, but I submit that this is a problem with their intuitions, not with the underlying viewpoint.
(If someone goes so far as to alter their decisions based on their belief in determinism—say, by lounging on the couch watching TV all day rather than being productive, because their doing so was “predetermined”—I would say that they are failing to utilize their brain’s decision-making apparatus. (Or rather, that they are not using it very well.) This has nothing to do with free will, determinism, or anything of the like; it is simply a (causal) consequence of the fact that they have misinterpreted what it means to be an agent in a deterministic universe.)
If someone goes so far as to alter their decisions based on their belief in determinism
You’re mixing levels. If someone can alter their decisions, that implies there are multiple possible next states of the universe, and that strict determinism is wrong. If the universe is actually determined, nobody alters any decisions, they just experience the decisions they are calculated to make.
You’re mixing levels. If someone can alter their decisions, that implies there are multiple possible next states of the universe
This is incorrect. It’s possible to imagine a counterfactual state in which the person in question differs from their actual self in an unspecified manner, which thereby causes them to make a different decision; this counterfactual state differs from reality, but it is by no means incoherent. Furthermore, the comparison of various counterfactual futures of this type is how decision-making works; it is an abstraction used for the purpose of computation, not something ontologically fundamental to the way the universe works—and the fact that some people insist it be the latter is the source of much confusion. This is what I meant when I wrote:
Decision-making itself is also a process that occurs in the map, not the territory; there is no contradiction here.
So there is no “mixing levels” going on here, as you can see; rather, I am specifically making sure to keep the levels apart, by not tying the mental process of imagining and assessing various potential outcomes to the physical question of whether there are actually multiple physical outcomes. In fact, the one who is mixing levels is you, since you seem to be assuming for some reason that the mental process in question somehow imposes itself onto the laws of physics.
(Here is a thought experiment: I think you will agree that a chess program, if given a chess position and run for a prespecified number of steps, will output a particular move for that position. Do you believe that this fact prevents the chess program from considering other possible moves it might make in the position? If so, how do you explain the fact that the chess program explicitly contains a game tree with multiple branches, the vast majority of which will not in fact occur?)
There are variouspostsinthesequences that directly address this confusion; I suggest either reading them or re-reading them, depending on whether you have already.
Certainly. Decision-making itself is also a process that occurs in the map, not the territory; there is no contradiction here. Some people may find the idea of decision-making being anything but a fundamental, ontologically primitive process somehow unsatisfying, or even disturbing, but I submit that this is a problem with their intuitions, not with the underlying viewpoint.
(If someone goes so far as to alter their decisions based on their belief in determinism—say, by lounging on the couch watching TV all day rather than being productive, because their doing so was “predetermined”—I would say that they are failing to utilize their brain’s decision-making apparatus. (Or rather, that they are not using it very well.) This has nothing to do with free will, determinism, or anything of the like; it is simply a (causal) consequence of the fact that they have misinterpreted what it means to be an agent in a deterministic universe.)
You’re mixing levels. If someone can alter their decisions, that implies there are multiple possible next states of the universe, and that strict determinism is wrong. If the universe is actually determined, nobody alters any decisions, they just experience the decisions they are calculated to make.
This is incorrect. It’s possible to imagine a counterfactual state in which the person in question differs from their actual self in an unspecified manner, which thereby causes them to make a different decision; this counterfactual state differs from reality, but it is by no means incoherent. Furthermore, the comparison of various counterfactual futures of this type is how decision-making works; it is an abstraction used for the purpose of computation, not something ontologically fundamental to the way the universe works—and the fact that some people insist it be the latter is the source of much confusion. This is what I meant when I wrote:
So there is no “mixing levels” going on here, as you can see; rather, I am specifically making sure to keep the levels apart, by not tying the mental process of imagining and assessing various potential outcomes to the physical question of whether there are actually multiple physical outcomes. In fact, the one who is mixing levels is you, since you seem to be assuming for some reason that the mental process in question somehow imposes itself onto the laws of physics.
(Here is a thought experiment: I think you will agree that a chess program, if given a chess position and run for a prespecified number of steps, will output a particular move for that position. Do you believe that this fact prevents the chess program from considering other possible moves it might make in the position? If so, how do you explain the fact that the chess program explicitly contains a game tree with multiple branches, the vast majority of which will not in fact occur?)
There are various posts in the sequences that directly address this confusion; I suggest either reading them or re-reading them, depending on whether you have already.